Remove Console Output Limits in Eclipse

Posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 8:00am by Rob Wilkerson

I run a lot of builds. I run the vast majority of those builds directly within Eclipse taking advantage of its integration with Ant and some of those builds are large. More accurately, some of those builds are verbose, whether it’s because I’m explicitly documenting what’s happening for later debugging or whether there’s a lot of output from a given task (svn export is a perfect example) that’s being displayed. Sometimes there’s so much output that the console’s buffer discards a portion of that output and prevents me from debugging effectively if a problem arises.

By default, Eclipse limits the console output buffer to 80,000 characters, but this can be changed easily enough. In my case, I like to remove the limit all together:

1. From the menu bar, go to Window > Preferences > Run/Debug > Console.
2. Uncheck the box labeled Limit console output.

With that limitation removed, I can access the unabridged version of my build output. This setting is not specific to Ant, of course. It will remove the buffer size limit for any action that directs output to the console.

ant, eclipse, configuration 2 Comments