I See You -- SWT Spy

January 7, 2010 | 1 min Read

I spent part of today trying to debug a Linux specific issue in which wizard pages are not being shown properly.  Actually, the content of some wizard pages are not showing up at all (Bug 298805 if you’re interested).

While thinking through the problem on IRC (yes, you should be on IRC), Susan McCourt had a great idea – install the SWT Spy and see what it shows.

The SWT Spy is a small tool that allows you to place your mouse over a widget and get information about that widget, including:

  1. Layout information
  2. Bounds
  3. Siblings
  4. Parent Chain (back to the shell)

I hacked the tool a bit to add the visibility field.  The SPY is available from: https://www.eclipse.org/swt/tools.php. Once installed, you can toggle the spy using CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+".".

An oldie but a goodie.

Ian Bull

Ian Bull

Ian is an Eclipse committer and EclipseSource Distinguished Engineer with a passion for developer productivity.

He leads the J2V8 project and has served on several …