Adam Howitt's Blog

Mar 18
2005

Eclipse Navigator Tidy

Working through some of the chapters I skipped in the Berthold Daum book last night I discovered the wonder of working sets for the Navigator view.  If you are like me and work on maintenance items as well as new development projects, your navigator pane in Eclipse gets quite cluttered.  Enter the "working set".  I had been using these for searches for some time (Ctrl H to do an extended search) but had no idea they affected the rest of Eclipse.

  1. In the Navigator pane click the black down arrow in the toolbar and you see the option to "Select Working Set". 
  2. If you already have some working sets defined you can just pick one, otherwise you will want to click New.
  3. Select Resource on the next page of the wizard
  4. Enter a friendly name for your set name
  5. Select the projects (or subsection of projects) you wish to include by checking the box and then click finish

I have reorganized my workspace now to the following working sets:

  • Maintenance - older projects refered to less often
  • New Development - current projects including our VSS repository for code templates
  • Personal - all the nerdy neat stuff I'm working on!
Not a huge productivity enhancer but it's a virtual version of the saying "tidy desk tidy mind" :-)

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  1. That's a cool tip Adam - I didn't know you could do that :-o very cool. And I thought the "go into" was the coolest thing the navigator did... Cheers

  2. Now that is a good tip!

    I've been using CFE for a while - its got more than a few projects in there now so I was hoping there would be a way to clean up the Navigator a bit.

    cheers

    David

  3. Just experimented with the working sets feature.

    Fantastic for improved workflow.

    Many thanks.

    Ethan Cane Web Developer

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