How to get the logs of platform plugins in eclipse

Question

I am new to eclipse plugin development. I would like to customise some of the eclipse functionalities in my plugin. So I would like to know, what happens in the background when

Answer 1

You can use the -debug <path to options file> argument when you start Eclipse to specify the path of a debug options file which is used to enable various debug tracing options. You may also want to use the -consoleLog argument.

A example options file would be:

# Turn on debugging for the org.eclipse.ui plugin.
org.eclipse.ui/debug=true

# Show all jobs in dialogs and the progress view including the support jobs
org.eclipse.ui/debug/showAllJobs=true

# Report if a stale job was found
org.eclipse.ui/debug/job.stale=true

The org.eclipse.ui/debug=true line enables debugging for a particular plugin in this case org.eclipse.ui. The other lines enable individual debugging options.

There are hundreds of these options, by convention most plugins include a .options file in the plugin jar listing the options that the plugin supports.

As mentioned in the comments in recent releases of Eclipse the debug tracing options are also available in the Preferences in 'General > Tracing' and on the Tracing tab of Launch Configurations.

You can also use 'plug-in spy' to find out the class which is displaying a dialog. Once this is installed you can press Alt+Shift+F1 when a dialog is displayed to get information. If you have the Eclipse source code plugins installed you can then go directly to the source code. For more information see Eclipse Source Code tutorial.