Working in Eclipse I wanted to find occurrences of some five character strings beginning with Y and ending with E. Easy enough right? Command-F to bring up the Find/Replace dialog, click “Regular expressions”, type “Y…E” into the Find: box, click Find, and… nothing.
Granted it was at most a minute before I figured out Eclipse had me searching for the three-character sequence Y…E. (Facepalm.) A couple of minutes later and I have the workaround: type the three periods last. But how do I just put a stop to this nonsense?
Eclipse uses SWT as the UI toolkit.
SWT, contrary to Swing and many other UI toolkits, is based on the native UI controls of the operating system. So if you have a text field in a dialog in Eclipse, it is actually a native text control from the underlying operating system/window system.
And… if you have any sort of “auto text” or “auto correct” enabled in the operating system, then this will also affect all your text fields in Eclipse.