Eclipse Project Neon.2 (4.6.2) - New and Noteworthy

Here are some of the more noteworthy things available in the Neon.2 update release which is now available for download.

Platform
Improved default styling for the toolbar (new in 4.6.1) The styling of the window toolbar has been improved. On Windows, the toolbar color is now consistent with the color of the perspective switcher.

On Linux and Mac, the separator line was removed, which gives you a few more pixels on Linux and removes a yellow line on the Mac.

Images are opened in the Eclipse IDE (new in 4.6.1) Image files are now opened directly in Eclipse by default. The Internal Web Browser has been registered as default editor for files with the png, jpg, jpeg, gif, bmp, and ico extensions.

Use Open With > System Editor to open files in the default external program.
"Terminate and Relaunch" from Run menu, context menu and tool bar (new in 4.6.1) A Terminate and Relaunch option is now available while launching from Run menu, context menu and tool bar. The default setting is to launch without terminating previous launches. To enable automatic termination, select the option Terminate and Relaunch while launching on Preferences > Run/Debug > Launching.

The behavior not selected on the preference page can also be activated on-demand by holding the Shift key while launching the configuration from history.

Command icons shown in Quick Access (new in 4.6.1) Quick Access (Ctrl+3) now shows the icon for a Command if available. Otherwise, it still shows the default blue ball.

Configure left and right sides in Compare editors (new in 4.6.2) Compare editors now offer a button Swap Left and Right View.

The direction of comparison is preserved between invocations of the Compare editor and can also be changed in the Compare/Patch preference page.

PDE
Validate launch configuration activated by default (new in 4.6.2) When you create a new Eclipse Application launch configuration, PDE will now by default enable the option to Validate Plug-ins automatically prior to launching. This helps you to identify missing plug-in dependencies before the actual start of the application and makes it easier for new plug-in and RCP developers to identify common problems. You can disable this validation in the launch configuration dialog, on the Plug-ins tab.

Platform Developers
Stable sorting in viewers based on ViewerComparator (new in 4.6.2) The org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ViewerComparator now ignores decorations from a DecoratingLabelProvider during its sorting. For example, if the EGit team provider is used, it prepends "> " for changed files. This additional "> " is now ignored.

The goal of this change is to eliminate java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Comparison method violates its general contract! that could occur when label decorations were updated in the background.

For now, you can disable this fix by setting the system property eclipse.disable.fix.for.bug364735 to true. This temporary system property is planned to be removed unless issues with the new sorting are discovered.

The above features are just the ones that are new in the Neon.1 and Neon.2 update releases. See also the News for Eclipse Neon. Neon.3 was a bug-fix release without notable new features.