[eclipse] Eclipse count lines of code

I've tried the Metrics plugin and although it's nice and all, it's not what my boss is looking for. It counts a line with just one } as a line and he doesn't want that to count as "its not a line, its a style choice". I also need to generate some form of report about the metrics provided. Are there any good tools for this?

This question is related to eclipse metrics line-count

The answer is


There's always the "brute force":

  1. Search->File

  2. Type the following in "Containing text" -> ^.*$. Then check the "Regular Expression" checkbox

  3. Type the following in "File name patterns" -> *.java

  4. Click "Search"

  5. Check the number of matches in the "Search" Tab.


If on OSX or *NIX use

Get all actual lines of java code from *.java files

find . -name "*.java" -exec grep "[a-zA-Z0-9{}]" {} \; | wc -l

Get all lines from the *.java files, which includes empty lines and comments

find . -name "*.java" -exec cat | wc -l

Get information per File, this will give you [ path to file + "," + number of lines ]

find . -name "*.java" -exec wc -l {} \;

ProjectCodeMeter counts LLOC (logical lines of code) exactly as you described (only effective lines). it integrates into eclipse as external code metrics tool, it's not real-time though, it generates a report.actually it counts many source code metrics such as complexity, arithmetic intricacy, hard coded strings, numeric constants.. even estimates development time in hours.


I created a Eclipse plugin, which can count the lines of source code. It support Kotlin, Java, Java Script, JSP, XML, C/C++, C#, and many other file types.

Please take a look at it. Any feedback would be appreciated!

the git-hub repository is here


For static analysis, I've used and recommend SonarQube which runs just about all the metrics you could possibly want on a wide range of languages, and is free in the basic version (you have to pay to analyse the sorts of languages I'd only code in with a gun to my head).

You have to install it as a web-app running the analysis off your source code repository, but it also has an Eclipse plugin.

It's overkill if you just want to know, as a one-off, how many lines of code there are in your project. If you want to track metrics through time, compare across projects, fire warnings when a threshold is exceeded, etc., it's fantastic.

Disclosure: I have no financial relationship with SonarSource.


The first thing to do is to determine your definition of "line of code" (LOC). In both your question

It counts a line with just one } as a line and he doesn't want that to count as "its not a line, its a style choice"

and in the answers, e.g.,

You can adjust the Lines of Code metrics by ignoring blank and comment-only lines or exclude Javadoc if you want

you can tell that people have different opinions as to what constitutes a line of code. In particular, people are often imprecise about whether they really want the number of lines of code or the number of statements. For example, if you have the following really long line filled with statements, what do you want to report, 1 LOC or hundreds of statements?

{ a = 1; b = 2; if (a==c) b++; /* etc. for another 1000 characters */ }

And when somebody asks you what you are calling a LOC, make sure you can answer, even if it is just "my definition of a LOC is Metrics2's definition". In general, for most commonly formatted code (unlike my example), the popular tools will give numbers fairly similar, so Metrics2, SonarQube, etc. should all be fine, as long as you use them consistently. In other words, don't count the LOC of some code using one tool and compare that value to a later version of that code that was measured with a different tool.


Another tool is Google Analytix, which will also allow you to run metrics even if you can`t build the project in case of errors


One possible way to count lines of code in Eclipse:

using the Search / File... menu, select File Search tab, specify \n[\s]* for Containing text (this will not count empty lines), and tick Regular expression.

Hat tip: www.monblocnotes.com/node/2030


Another way would by to use another loc utility, like LocMetrics for instance.
It also lists many other loc tools. The integration with Eclipse wouldn't be always there (as it would be with Metrics2, which you can check out because it is a more recent version than Metrics), but at least those tools can reason in term of logical lines (computed by summing the terminal semicolons and terminal curly braces).
You can also check with eclipse-metrics is more adapted to what you expect.