Categorise projects in the Package Explorer to reduce clutter in Eclipse

If you’ve been hanging onto one Eclipse workspace for the last couple of years, you’ll probably have dozens of projects cluttering up your workspace. If you’re an Eclipse RCP developer, you may be sitting with around 50+ projects easily.

The thing is that you’ll often only work with 1 or 2 at a time, not the whole lot. And sometimes you want a convenient way of only browsing projects belonging to a specific product/feature/layer/any-other-grouping-that-makes-sense. Having all projects in a long list makes it difficult to manage and more difficult to browse.

That’s why the Package Explorer and Project Explorer have a nice feature that reduces the clutter and allows you to organise your project into categories that make sense. So instead of the Package Explorer looking unwieldy and flat like this,

it could look like this:

Share Eclipse perspective layouts across multiple workspaces

Once you’ve configured Eclipse preferences to your heart’s content, you’ll often want to share those preferences across multiple workspaces. Now normally you can go to File > Export > General > Preferences to save your preferences to a properties file which you can then import into the other workspace. This will share settings such as your customised keyboard shortcuts, formatting, repository settings, etc.

But, for some reason, Eclipse doesn’t save perspective/window layouts, such as which views are open and where they are placed in the perspective. So you’ll find yourself spending another half hour configuring the window to the way you like it. After the 3rd workspace you need to create, this becomes frustrating and just wastes time.

Fortunately there are ways to save and restore these settings automatically. The first is to save the perspective into the preferences (currently only works in Eclipse 3, to be fixed in Eclipse 4) and the other is to use Eclipse’s Copy Settings feature when opening the other workspace. I prefer the first option, but I’ll mention the second option and when to use the one over the other.

The fastest ways to navigate views in Eclipse using the keyboard

With so many views in Eclipse (around 50 for a default install), it can become difficult to navigate them all, especially when you don’t want to reach for the mouse all the time. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post on how to manage keyboard shortcuts, learning how to use the keyboard efficiently can save you oodles of time later on.

Fortunately, Eclipse has a number of ways to navigate between views using only the keyboard. I’ll discuss the Show View shortcuts, the Show Views dialog, Quick Access and then view cycling, with some advice on when to use which one. There’s also a bonus tip on how to activate the editor with the keyboard once you’re done with a view.

Instantly show a class/file in the Package/Project Explorer in Eclipse

While working on a class or XML file, you’ll often find that you want to work with the actual .class or .xml file in the Package Explorer, Project Explorer or Navigator views. You may want to copy, move or delete the file or do stuff that are only accessible in these views (eg. browse all files in the same folder).

Eclipse has a feature called Show In, that’s almost like a Quick Open. It instantly navigates to the current editor’s file in a requested view and positions you directly on the file in that view, no matter how deep in the hierarchy the file is. It’s also keyboard friendly, which means no more reaching for the mouse.

This feature is perfect for those (like me) who don’t like the Link with Editor functionality on certain views. I don’t like the Package Explorer to Link with Editor as I like to know things are the way I left them (see the rant at the end of the post).