Eclipse description box font color

Question

I'm using Eclipse Mars 2 CDT in Slackware64-14.2 and everything works great except for description boxes when hovering over toolbar icons and other buttons. As shown in the screenshot:

the text in the description box is not visible due to the font color.

Answer 1

System Theme

This is (most likely) down to themeing issues and Eclipse and your window manager not getting along as well as they should. I am not aware of which window manager theme (i.e. System setting, not Eclipse setting) is best for your distribution with Eclipse, but you can try changing it to see if it works.

GTK2 vs GTK3

Another possibility is a GTK2 vs GTK3 issue. Neon has significantly improved support for GTK3, but Mars runs with GTK3 by default. You can run with GTK2 by setting the SWT_GTK3 environment variable to 0 like this:

$ SWT_GTK3=0 ./eclipse

or add the --launcher.GTK_version command line argument like this:

$ ./eclipse --launcher.GTK_version 2

If GTK2 works, you can add it to the eclipse.ini file (before -vmargs) to make the GTK2 default like this:

[...]
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.appendVmargs
--launcher.GTK_version
2
-vm
/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle/jre/bin
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.8
[...]

Disable Eclipse Themeing

Starting with Eclipse 4.6 (Neon) you can also try disabling theming altogether from Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance and unchecking Enable theming (requires restart):