F4 Logo F4 is an awesome eclipse based IDE for Fantom. I use it every day.

But sometimes it takes a ..l..o..n..g..t..i..m..e.. to start up, and other times it just hangs forever on the splash screen.

It's annoying when it happens because I have to forcibly close the splash screen via Windows Task Manager.

It tends to happen on my laptop more, when the computer (and hence F4) wasn't shut down properly.

It turns out this isn't an F4 problem, but more of a general eclipse issue. To get around it, I just delete all the .SNAP files from the .metadata directory in my workspace, and restart F4.

Doing so is easy. I use the Windows file explorer to:

  1. Navigate to the .metadata workspace directory (which for me is C:\Projects\.f4\.metadata\)
  2. Type .snap in the search bar
  3. Highlight all files listed of type .SNAP (be careful not to highlight files that just happen to contain the word SNAP!)
  4. Press delete!

Delete all .SNAP files in the workspace directory

It seems to be safe and my F4 environment hasn't suffered any ill effects from me doing so.

You can read more about the .snap files and the eclipse workspace in these StackOverflow questions:

Written by Steve Eynon ( ) on 2nd November 2015
Tags: F4

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