I installed Spoofax and created a new EntityLang project following the Spoofax guide.
I opened the example.ent file, selected it, and tried to pull down the Transform menu with the left mouse button.
It does not pull down, it is only a button with the tooltip “Apply transformation to file in current editor.”
That is, it lacks the menu item “Show AST” and so forth.

My configuration:
AMD64 architecture
Ubuntu 10.4 LTS
Eclipse 3.5.2
Java 6
the latest Spoofax release
The project builds with no apparent errors.

The only warning in Eclipse “Problems” tab is:
Description Resource Path Location Type
Build path specifies execution environment J2SE-1.5. There are no JREs installed in the workspace that are strictly compatible with this environment. comp.any.entities Build path JRE System Library Problem
But I think this can be ignored since I think I have Java 6 which should work.

This is not a high priority.
Spoofax seems to work, it just doesn’t show me the AST.
I am not very familiar with Eclipse.

Submitted by lloyd konneker on 4 October 2011 at 16:14

Have you tried clicking on the down pointing arrow at the right hand side of the button? That works for me, “normal” clicking the button seems to repeat the last chosen transformation.

Thanks. Yes you are correct, it works as designed.

I was not familiar with that user interface widget.
I thought it was a conventional pulldown menu.
Instead it is a button with two action areas (not the arrow, and the arrow).
It behaves like this:
It IS a button: on mouseover or hover, the visual aspect shows a raised outline (around both action areas.)
If you click on the main part of the button, it performs the last choice of action.
If you click (press AND release) the arrow, it pops up a menu of choices.
If you click on a choice, it performs that action and sets it as the default action
for subsequent clicks of the main part of the button.

IMO this widget is not user friendly, at least to novice users.
You must remember what your last choice of action was
(the text of the button is always a generic term describing the class of actions i.e. Transform.)
It needs more visual distinction between the two action areas.

I realize the Spoofax creators did not invent this widget.

Thanks to the Spoofax creators also.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always disliked the widget design as well. Thanks for your response, Thomas. Closing this issue.