Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I find the documentation?

The full official user guide can be found here. It is also included in the plug-in and integrated into the Eclipse help once the update is installed.

There is also a set of howto articles on the blog:

1. The Basics
2. The Basics Pt. 2
3. Capture Groups
4. Filtering Output with the Grep View
5. Links
6. Autostart Links
7. Rewriting Lines
8. Notifications

My lines are highlighted in the console, but they don’t show up in Grep View. What’s wrong?

Usually, this is caused by Grep Console’s “match length” preferences. For performance reasons, the output lines from the console can be shortened internally before they are tested against the regular expressions. There are different match length settings for highlighting expressions in the console and for filtering them (for Grep View, notifications etc.), and because filtering is much more demanding, the default match length of 50 characters for filtering is considerably shorter than that for highlighting (150 characters). If the relevant part of your line occurs (at least partially) after the configured limit, Grep Console will not pick it up! (See howto #4 for some more details on this).

There are two solutions to the problem: You can increase your match length settings in the Eclipse preferences, possibly at some performance cost. Or you can use “quick expressions”. A quick expression is a secondary regular expression which you can configure on an expression item. If present, the quick expression will be evaluated first, and only if it matches will the main expression be tested as well. The idea is that the quick expression should be “simple” and therefore easy for Java to handle, and that’s why the quick expression is always tested against the entire output line, regardless of your match length settings. This allows you to circumvent the match length restrictions for specific expressions without reducing performance by changing the global match length limits.

Is the source code available?

Yes. You can install it directly through Eclipse or download it manually from the installation page.

I like the plug-in. Can I donate?

Yes, there’s a PayPal donation link in the sidebar on the right. Please keep in mind that donations (and the amount you donate) are entirely voluntary and do not obligate me in any way. Though they are of course likely to motivate me to improve the plug-in.

I found a bug. Where do I report it?
I have an idea for a new feature. Can I tell you about it?

Please use the email address on the feedback page for bug reports and feature requests. I do read all the comments on the website pages, but organising and discussing bug and feature information is much easier via standard email.

When trying to open an external browser in Linux, all I get is an exception saying the SWT library could not be loaded?

Make sure you have the SWT GTK Gnome JNI library installed. On Ubuntu 12.10, the exact name of the library is libswt-gnome-gtk-3-jni.