Gigantic Tabs in Eclipse on Ubuntu

Question

EDIT: For anyone coming to this question through searching, you can install a Gnome Theme called Clearlooks Compact to shorten your tabs in Eclipse. This will free up a lot of screen space. You can also check out the answer below to learn how to make the tabs more horizontally compact.

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Short version: How do I make a short version of Eclipse's tabs & toolbars in Ubuntu?

I've been looking around for a fix to this on Google, but to no avail. With any GTK theme, I still have this same issue and it's very, very annoying--to the point where I've stopped using Eclipse in favor of gEdit. However, after running pylint from a terminal too. many. times. I've decided I need to find a solution to this issues with Eclipse so I can have PyDev back. Here's what the tabs look like:

As you can see, not only are the tabs exaggerated, but the toolbar is, too: so is the toolbar on the bottom; so are the tabs in the bottom pane. Overall, it's eating up a lot of screen space, which is a hard item to come by on a 17" screen. Any suggestions/fixes?

Answer 1

I too have suffered from this quiet a bit, before I found the solution by changing the general appearance of my IDE.

You can try and customize the look-and-feel or you Eclipse Environment from,

Go to : Widow -> Preference -> General -> Appearance.

try setting,

1. Current Presentation to " Default ".
2. Enable " Traditional Style Tabs " (for rectangular tabs.)
3. Diasble Animation ( if you don't like swoosh effect.)

Answer 2

If you really want to make the tabs nice an' short, take a gander at Clearlooks Compact.

I preferred to just hit the whole IDE with a splash of "meh," so here's what I ended up with.

Answer 3

This can be solved changing your GTK settings;

gedit ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Then add this;

style "gtkcompact" {
GtkButton::default_border={0,0,0,0}
GtkButton::default_outside_border={0,0,0,0}
GtkButtonBox::child_min_width=0
GtkButtonBox::child_min_heigth=0
GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_x=0
GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_y=0
GtkMenu::vertical-padding=1
GtkMenuBar::internal_padding=0
GtkMenuItem::horizontal_padding=4
GtkToolbar::internal-padding=0
GtkToolbar::space-size=0
GtkOptionMenu::indicator_size=0
GtkOptionMenu::indicator_spacing=0
GtkPaned::handle_size=4
GtkRange::trough_border=0
GtkRange::stepper_spacing=0
GtkScale::value_spacing=0
GtkScrolledWindow::scrollbar_spacing=0
GtkTreeView::vertical-separator=0
GtkTreeView::horizontal-separator=0
GtkTreeView::fixed-height-mode=TRUE
GtkWidget::focus_padding=0
}
class "GtkWidget" style "gtkcompact"

borrowed from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1465712