Trimming the history list in Eclipse's internal web browser
I use the internal web browser quite a bit when I’m developing - if nothing
else, it’s a handy place to test out the GET requests for RESTful web services.
I also use Eclipse for HTML writing, and again the internal browser is a useful
first test of “does this look right yet?”. This means I build up quite a long
history list, and the most recent entries – the ones I’m mostly likely to be
looking for – require scrolling to find and re-use them. I have not, to date,
found a setting inside Eclipse (I’m using 3.3.2 at the time of writing this) to
edit the internal browser history. I’d be delighted to be proved wrong. In the
meantime, the workaround is to close Eclipse, then edit the file
$WORKSPACE/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.browser.prefs
where $WORKSPACE is your Eclipse workspace root directory. This is a plain
text file: my preferred text editor on Linux and Windows is
SciTE but it doesn’t actually matter
which one. This file has a preference key internalWebBrowserHistory, with the
format:
internalWebBrowserHistory=_url_|*|_url_|*| ...
Removing stale entries is straightforward; modifying or adding new entries is
perfectly doable, noting that colon characters (:) are escaped with a
preceding backslash (\:). Save changes, restart Eclipse, done. Hopefully
there will be an internal preference editor to make this easier inside Eclipse
in future (or, someone will point out to me that I’ve been unobservant and that
it’s already there).