Subhadip's Blog

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How to fix Eclipse IDE flickering issue on Debian

- Published on 25 January, 2019

I am using Eclipse IDE (version 2018-12 at the time of writing) on Debian 9 Xfce and the issue with it is that the Eclipse editor windows would flicker around the edges. Sometimes so much so that it's impossible to type inside it. Here's how I fixed it:

First check the value of GTK_IM_MODULE in your environment by executing

echo $GTK_IM_MODULE

In my case the output was "xim". But Eclipse expect it to be "ibus". So enter the following command in a terminal session to set it to the value.

export GTK_IM_MODULE="ibus"

Now if you launch Eclipse from the same terminal session, you should not experience any flickering issue. If you launch eclipse from a desktop menu entry, then edit the .desktop file and put the following string in the beginning of the Exec command:

env GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus