"Error while loading manipulator"

You can try to follow the various suggestions mentioned in the bug 277242

Also check your eclipse.ini:

More generally, the error you're seeing can happen when we cannot read "-startup" since we use this to position the install.area.

As suggested by Jelle van Geuns in the comments (and confirmed by Halfstop):

I found that one MacOS there are two folders (MacOS and Eclipse) with two separate sets of configuration files.
Each had an 'org.eclipse.equinox.launcher' startup jar in the plugins sub-folder, but with slightly different versions.

The Eclipse executable resides in the MacOS folder.
But the eclipse.ini there was set up to look for the startup jar under Eclipse/plugins, but with the wrong version.

Solution that worked for me was to copy both versions of the startup.jar to both the plugins sub-folders.

Halfstop confirms:

I copied all of the what was in Eclipse to the MacOS directory and this solved it.

I just ran into this problem today. The answer provided by VonC et al helped to locate the problem but didn't quite fix it.

In my case, the location specified in -startup within the MacOS/eclipse.ini was incorrectly looking in the ../Eclipse/plugins folder rather than the ../MacOS/plugins folder.

I corrected the path and the error went away.