I recently blogged that the Code Formatter is lame. This got a few comments that I should be using the Jalopy plug-in. I am not keen to go down this path as development on the open source project appears to have stopped.

Jonathan Aquino questioned what version of Eclipse I was running as the formatter worked just fine for him. Since I am running 3.0.1, I did not think this would be the problem. But it got me thinking, the code formatter setup I have was developed on an earlier version 3M build. So I rebuilt the setup from scratch using the Java Conventions profile that is built-in. Well, I will be darned, it now works! I looked at the profile settings and cannot see any visible differences that would change the way the formatter works.

So I guess the lessons learnt were:

  • It pays to blog about your problem
  • The Eclipse Code Formatter is not lame - if you properly configure it.
  • Be wary about migrating profiles through upgrades to Eclipse (which is far enough).