Eclipse 3.3 default editor under Vista

Question

I switched some months ago from Eclipse 3.0 under Win2000 to Eclipse 3.3.2 under Vista. With my old platform, when I opened a file from eclipse navigator, for which no particular editor was configured, the file was defaultly opened with LPAD editor.

Now with my new platform, in the same situation, Eclipse delegates the choice to Vista, so to keep the same behavior I have to explicitly add the "unknown" extension in Window / Preferences, menu General / Editors / File Associations, and configure it to open with eclipse text editor. Of course ".*" si not accepted like a valid extension, so I have to do it extension by extension. And by the way there are tons of such "unknown" extensions I work with : .launch, .cvsignore, .pmd, .ruleset, .bindings, .csv (I want to edit such with textEditor, not excel), .vm, and so on...

From eclipse navigator I can open the context menu and select, for THIS particular file, to open it with the text editor, but it does not apply to other files with the same extension.

It's worse when opening the file from Open Resource dialog box, as in this case the context menu is not even available.

In a word, is there any way to configure eclipse 3.3.2 under Vista so that any file with an unknown extension will open with a given eclipse default editor ?

Answer 1

There are some relevant feature requests for similar use cases (but they are there for years so don't expect to implement them soon):

• Default editor for unknown extensions
• File Associations doesn't accept standard wildcards

Currently you have to manage each important "dot-started names" individually in File Associations as you mentioned, I suppose.