How do I turn off '*' in multi-line comments in Eclipse?

Question

When coding with Eclipse, how do you turn off the \"*\" comments that come up when you start a multi-line comment?

Instead of seeing this,

/**
* Here is          


        

Answer 1

With eclipse 4.2.1 I used the formatter off / on feature, be sure to not have the formatter on tag on the same line as the comments tag other wise the stars nightmare will be back.

// @formatter:off
/*
Eclipse your * are messing up my comments big time and If I used you
more often I'd put a patch together to add back in the "Add Leading Star" option 
*/
// @formatter:on

The on/off features have to be turned "on" in Eclipse preferences: Java > Code Style > Formatter. Click on "Edit" button, "Off/On Tags", check off "Enable Off/On tags".

From

How to turn off the Eclipse code formatter for certain sections of Java code?

Also. I change the tags to //off //on for ease of use

A similar post is How to disable the automatic asterisk (inserting stars) in Eclipse when adding a multi-line comment?

Answer 2

As mentioned in this thread, you can only do that (meaning "disabling the leading asterisks") by going to

 Preferences > Java > Code Style > Code Templates

So for example, if you modify the template for comments of a field into:

/**

 */

It will come that way (without any asterisk in the middle) when you will comment a Field.

However, it does go against the Sun convention for Java comment formatting up to jdk1.3 (update: current oracle link) (as seen also here)...
However, as noted in the comments by Amedee Van Gasse:

Starting with Javadoc 1.4, the leading asterisks are optional.

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An even simpler way (if you only need to do that for certain comments of your codes, while keeping the other one with the standard style) is, when a multi-line comment appear like this one:

/**
 *
 */

, you can first remove the one leading asterisk, the enter your comments.
You will see no other leading asterisks are showing up at the beginning of each new line of comments.

 /**

  */

 /**
    My first line of comment
    My second line of comment
    My third line of comment
  */