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I will be programming my merry heart out when suddenly nothing I type makes sense, it starts adding in incorrect characters and deleting random chunks of code whenever I press a key. Undo actually makes the problem worse.

This can all be fixed by force quiting eclipse (once this starts happening it's impossible to quit normally) and restarting it. I thought it might have something to do with my installation, but I've now had it happen across multiple different Ubuntu versions on different computers (also in a CrunchBang installation).

I have no idea what is going on here, and have not been able to find any references to people having the same problem. It seems to happen more often when editing files with both PHP and HTML in them, specifically when editing the HTML parts.

What is causing this and how can I fix it short of switching to another IDE (which believe me, I am VERY close to doing even though I would have to re-setup all my projects).

Edit: After more thorough searching through the Eclipse bug reports I found a bug report with the same problem. It has been confirmed on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Seven, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.

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Assuming this is not occurring in any other applications, you should report this as a bug in Eclipse. If you installed Eclipse through Ubuntu's eclipse package, see this guide for reporting bugs. If you installed Eclipse from something you downloaded from the upstream site, you should report the bug here instead. – Eliah Kagan Jun 6 '12 at 18:58
It has happened to be from both types of installations, should I report in both places? or just one? – hamalnamal Jun 6 '12 at 19:33
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In that case, you could just report it upstream. However, since this appears to be a very serious stability/usability bug, it probably qualifies for an SRU in Ubuntu, so after reporting it upstream, I recommend reading that SRU page and filing a downstream bug report on Launchpad against eclipse in Ubuntu, describing the problem, linking to the upstream bug report, and arguing that it deserves an SRU. (Search Launchpad first to see if there's already a downstream report.) – Eliah Kagan Jun 6 '12 at 19:42
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After filing the downstream report (if you decide to do that), link it upstream with the Also affects project link on its Launchpad bug page. Then comment in the upstream report so that people there have a link to the downstream report. Finally, please note that if you're reporting this downstream, you should do it with ubuntu-bug eclipse or (even better) ubuntu-bug PID where PID is the process ID of the running eclipse process. (This is all explained in Ubuntu's community documentation.) – Eliah Kagan Jun 6 '12 at 19:43

2 Answers

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I've seen this happen specifically when eclipse has trouble determining multiple functions of the same name. My solution is to break those functions in to separate files.

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What languages are you using when this happens, it only happens to me in PHP, and seems to be a bug in PDT. Do you experience it elsewhere? – hamalnamal Jun 12 '12 at 16:10
I have experienced it with javascript – Call me V Jun 12 '12 at 16:26
up vote 0 down vote

After thorough searching through the Eclipse bug reports I found a bug report with the same problem. It has been confirmed on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Seven, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux.

Apparently this has been a problem for quite a while and seems to be a bug in PDT.

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