What's New in Eclipse 4.29

Here are descriptions of some of the changes of interest to plug-in developers made to the Eclipse Platform and SWT for the 4.29 release of Eclipse.

New features oriented towards end-users of the platform can be viewed in the What's New section of the Eclipse Platform User Guide.

SWT Changes

Control.setFocus() no longer activates its Shell Previously calling Control.setFocus() also activated its Shell. This behavior was never documented and was never explained why it existed. But it caused problems: setting focus to a control in a background Shell caused the Shell to jump on user.

Now setting focus just sets focus, even if the Shell is in the background. To also bring Shell to front, explicitly call Shell.setActive().

This change can be disabled using a Java property. For Example, add this VM argument in eclipse.ini or on the command line after -vmargs:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.activateShellOnForceFocus=true

Note: this property is only added temporarily and will be removed later.

See SWT Issue 450