Monday, May 06, 2013

Quick Tip: Naming Eclipse Workspaces

I often have multiple eclipse workspaces open.  Windows 7 stacks them nicely for me, but this presents a problem: it is difficult to distinguish between them when switching between the applications.  The path of the currently open file in each instance is visible, but that is not always enough information.


 I've always used the -showLocation command line option which appends the location of the workspace to the end of the title.  Unfortunately, most of the time the title is too long for the workspace location to show up when switching between applications.

Today I decided to go hunting through the Eclipse preferences and I found exactly what I was looking for:

Naming Eclipse Workspaces

After setting names for all my workspaces, their titles are now useful:



2 comments:

Andrew Eisenberg said...

This is a good idea. However, I prefer to set the background color for the text editor to something slightly different for each workspace. Grey is Kepler, green is Juno, Yellow is Indigo, etc (feel free to choose your own favorite colors).

Wolfgang Schell said...

I've used workspace names for a while now and this is invaluable when working with workspaces from multiple projects or branches.

For Mac OSX, there is a nice plugin called "OS X Eclipse Launcher", which also displays the name in a badge in the dock:

https://github.com/turesheim/eclipse-utilities
http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/osx-eclipse-launcher#.UYjPpSv5_CM