Can I get rid of the status bar at the bottom of Eclipse?

Question

Eclipse 3.5 eats up a lot of vertical space with the status bar at the bottom of the window. To be clear, the status bar says "Writable | Smart Insert | 32:100" right now.

Is there a way I can get rid of it? Right-clicking doesn't do anything, and there isn't a handle to drag...

Answer 1

If you have a lower vertical resolution monitor, the Eclipse full-screen plugin may help you to maximize your work area.

It maximimizes Eclipse to the full screen, hiding the toolbar, the statusbar and (optionally) the menu bar as well (if you know Ctrl+3 in Eclipse 3.5 you would not need the menu bar any more :) ).

Answer 2

Interestingly enough, this new version (early November 2010) of the old eclipse full screen project (initially for eclipse 3.4) allows for the status bar to be hidden or not to be hidden.

See GitHub Eclipse full-screen.

The rationale behind this evolution is described in this blog post:

Originally, the plugin maximizes the usable space by hiding everything but the editors and navigator — which means hiding even the status bar, making it really hard for developers to use.

The single available option was to show/hide the Menu Bar, which is useful for RCP apps.
But for IDE usage the status line MUST show up (it’s impossible to debug a stacktrace without knowing which line you are, for instance).

So now, you have "more choices":