Eclim + Android in 2017

This post tries to help to get eclim working with Android. Google does no longer support Android development in Eclipse. If you absolutely want to use vim, then the Eclim plugin gives autocompletion and source code validation for Java via an eclipse server that runs in the background. It is essentially a giant big hack, but so far it worked for me. What follows has only been tested with Eclim’s headless eclipse server.

Suppose you have a working android gradle project for which you want to use eclim. First add the directory path/to/your/gradle/project/app/src/main as an Android Project to Eclipse. Make sure your Android-SDK path is set up correctly. After some classpath tweaking you should be able to get most Android modules imported. In my case, I then had problems importing the following Android Support Libraries.

import android.support.annotation.NonNull;
import android.support.v13.app.FragmentCompat;
import android.support.v4.app.ActivityCompat;

I tracked down the libraries in question in the Android SDK directory. In my case, they were located at path/to/android/sdk/extras/android/m2repository/com/android/support/. I added them manually to the Java Build Path in Eclipse. For some I had to extract the JAR files from the AAR files, as described in the following StackOverflow answer. This solved the problem for the first two imports, but the last import still could not be resolved. I thought that some dependencies might still be missing and wrote the following script to extract all the JAR class files in the path/to/android/sdk/extras directory. After adding all these JAR files to Java Build Path, Eclipse finally could resolve all imports. The script can be used as follows:

./extract_classes -src /path/to/android/sdk/dir -des /my/dir

It recursivly looks at all subdirectories of the specified Android SDK folder until it either finds a JAR file which is not Javadoc or Source and copies it to the destination directory. If an AAR file is found the content is extracted to a folder of the same name as described in the above answer and the JAR file in that folder copied with an appropriate name to the destination directory.

My whole impression of the endeavor was that Google does not make it exactly easy to support a development environment other than Android Studio.