How to make Eclipse installed via snap use a differerent configuration when started from global menu

Question

Files from software installed via snap are read-only. To configure Eclipse, however, we need to change its eclipse.ini file. How to do it so, when pressing the Super key and clicking on Eclipse's logo, it uses the new configuration?

Answer 1

There are many possible solutions but the my favorite/simplest one is to use Menulibre:

1. Copy /snap/eclipse/current/eclipse.ini to somewhere you can edit it. Let us say, copy it to /etc/eclipse.ini.

2. Edit the arguments you want to update^[1] and save the file.

3. Open Menulibre^[2]

4. Search for "Eclipse."

5. Click in the Eclipse icon.

6. In the "Command" input, add the --launcher.ini option after the binary path. In our example, we would replace

    /snap/bin/eclipse %U
   

   with

    /snap/bin/eclipse  --launcher.ini /etc/eclipse.ini %U
   

7. Click in Menulibre's "Save" button. I have only tested it on Unity and MATE, though, not sure it is going to work with GNOME 3.

So far, it is working to me.

---

Notes

^[1] I, for example, changed

    -Xms
    256m
    -Xmx
    1024m

to

    -Xms
    1024m
    -Xmx
    4096m

^[2] You may have to install it. A way to do it is to use APT:

$ sudo apt-get install menulibre