How can I pin Eclipse Luna to the Windows-7 taskbar?

I have used the -vm setting in eclipse.ini in past versions, but it did not solve the issue here. Pinning to the Task Bar directly seemed to leave me with a duplicate icon once Luna finished initializing. FWIW, I seem to have hacked into a correction. First I right-clicked eclipse.exe and Pinned to the Start Menu. Then after starting Luna from Start, I right-clicked the icon which appeared on the Task Bar, and Pinnned to the TaskBar. Then I unpinned from the Start Menu (since I prefer direct access to the icon rather than Start > Eclipse). And once done, Luna now starts from the Task Bar and the icon is updated, but not duplicated, when fully loaded.


Had this issue with Eclipse Mars 64 bits on Windows 10 Pro x64 Insider Preview Build 10130. The only way I managed to fix that is by executing Eclipse as it was a Windows Vista app:

  1. Remove any pinned icon to fom the taskbar

  2. Right click on the Eclipse executable -> Properties -> Compatibility tab -> Compatibility Mode

  3. Check Run this program in compatibility mode for

  4. Select Windows Vista (any of them).

  5. Execute Eclipse by clicking on the executable and pin it when it's fully loaded.

I didn't need to add the -vm flag in neither the shortcut (C:\Users\[Your User]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar) or the eclipse.ini file.


The steps:

  1. Go to your eclipse installation directory, right click eclipse.exe and click "Create shortcut"
  2. Open Eclipse by double-clicking the newly created shortcut.
  3. Go past the workspace selection and the splash screen. Once Eclipse is fully loaded, right-click the Eclipse icon in the taskbar, and click "Pin this program to taskbar".
  4. Close Eclipse.
  5. Delete the shortcut.

The results:

  • No duplicate Eclipse taskbar entries, which is a known issue in the latest Eclipse releases
  • Context menu of Eclipse's taskbar entry works (I noticed this is a new issue in Eclipe Luna)

You have to make sure that Eclipse will run in a good JVM, too. You can therefore modify your PATH system variable to include the path to the JVM of your choice, or modify the eclipse.ini file in the same directory as eclipse.exe, and add the following 2 lines:

-vm
C:/Program Files/Java/[your Java VM]/bin

If you choose the PATH solution, you append to your PATH variable this piece of text:

;C:/Program Files/Java/[your Java VM]/bin

Ensure yourself that Eclipse is running in the JVM you chose, by opening Windows Task Manager and inspecting the command line used to run Eclipse. On my system, I noticed that some javaw.exe located in C:\Windows\System32\ was used, which was not what I wanted.