Eclipse @author

Most Java developers know eclipse is an awesome IDE, it’s customisation and auto-completeness is great.. It even auto completes annotations in the code far ya.

When added a @author annotation to some code, it’ll automatically try and add your name.. which is great, but it uses your logon name, not my real name. It’s not that big a deal, cause retyping your name is easy!

But curiosity got the better of me, I wanted to know if there was a place you can set the author name correctly.. and there is! When starting eclipse you can pass in an option:
eclipse -Duser.name=Matthew Oliver

But most people want to run eclipse from the menu, sure you can update the menu item, but there is another way. In the eclipse installation directory there is an eclipse.ini file, just append -Duser.name=<name> and that’s it.

For those of you following along at home, or those of you who are sysadmins, may realise that is a major problem.. can you figure it out?

By setting the user.name in the ini file, you forcing the user.name for everyone who uses eclipse on that machine, if there is only one person then there is no problem, but if there’s more however…

Maybe editing the menu item is better after all 😉 or maybe there is an eclipse.ini file under ~/.eclipse somewhere!! Who knows.