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I have been using Indigo for a while, and now trying Juno
There is a sligth bothering difference:

On Indigo When you had 10 tabs opened

A | B | C | D | J | H | G ....(F | T | S)

and currently on B
when you selected the file shown in tab T again, then this tab (on Indigo and that's the problem not on Juno) would be repositioned like that:

A | B | T | C | D | J | H ....( G | F | S)

This is useful since, if opening T after B, it means they should be grouped together

on Juno it does not reposition them, instead you will need to find most recent files far in the tab list

Q: how to set it back? I searched params with 'tabs' in the options with no result

edit: still the same in new versions (Kepler)

edit: Thanks to Paul' answer, a good solution is to search for .css files in eclipse folder, and set swt-mru-visible property to true in e4-default-win7.css for example

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    I know this is an old question. But on every new version of eclipse, I keep on coming back here to get the answer. It still amazes me that the bug related to it is still unchanged since 2012. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=396008 – Fabricio Buzeto Aug 15 '14 at 19:25

2 Answers2

86

Juno by default doesn't present the MRU (Most Recently Used) tab behaviour that you see in Indigo (it never worked quite right) and instead uses the Editor document order.

I believe you can re-activate it be either switching to the Classic theme in Preferences>General>Appearance or by editing the CSS. See http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/CSS

.MPartStack {
    swt-mru-visible: true;
}

Don't forget to restart Eclipse to make it use the new parameters.

Aldian
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Paul Webster
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    This has to be by far the most annoying behaviour in Juno. If MRU wasn't working properly they should have fixed it and failing that left it the way it was until they could. It's extremely aggravating to flip between two editors in Juno with the default behaviour. – locka Mar 11 '13 at 09:27
  • This answer got me really excited, but changing this value in `JUNO_SR2_HOME/plugins/org.eclipse.platform_4.2.2.v201302041200/css/e4_basestyle.css` had no effect on tab ordering behaviour for me. Is something other than a restart required to activate the MRU setting? – Jonathan Fuerth Aug 06 '13 at 18:23
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    Aha, it is explicitly set to false again in `e4_default_mac.css`. Changing it there and then restarting Eclipse did the trick. – Jonathan Fuerth Aug 06 '13 at 18:32
  • As for the linked Eclipse4/CSS plugin site... the instructions on that page currently say to install from http://download.eclipse.org/e4/updates/0.15-I-builds/ but that URL is no longer valid. I found the plugin at: http://download.eclipse.org/e4/updates/0.16-I-builds/ – Lambart May 24 '14 at 23:12
  • I wish I knew who made this change in Eclipse so I could actively hate a specific person instead of hating the software in general. – miguel Sep 29 '14 at 23:38
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    In Mars, June 2015, there will be a preference so that you don't have to edit CSS. – Paul Webster Apr 23 '15 at 16:35
12

Apparently this option was added in Eclipse Mars 4.5:

Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance ->

Visible tabs on overflow:

[X] Show most recently used tabs

Robert Mikes
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