Doug Hughes is a veteran programmer who
founded Alagad after briefly flirting with a career in computer animation.
Doug has a strong record of achievement with large, complex web applications.
His ability to learn and apply new technologies and techniques has helped Doug become one of the web application
development industry’s most highly regarded experts.
Doug’s current focus at Alagad is leading an application development team dedicated to helping organizations improve operational efficiency and performance. This commitment to client success has helped Alagad achieve record growth. A frequent speaker at industry conferences and user groups, Doug also regularly contributes to several well-known open source projects. In addition, his articles have been featured in numerous technical publications.
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Using Eclipse Working Sets Instead of Workspaces
One of my biggest gripes about Eclipse has always been the use of workspaces to organize projects. For example, I had a client not too long ago for whom I had several Eclipse projects created. I had at least three projects for frameworks alone. Then I had the legacy application and the new application we were building. I'm sure there was at least one more in there too.
Now, it seems like the most widely known way to separate this from your copious list of other projects was to create a Workspace. The problem with workspaces, however, is that to switch between workspaces you must start a different instance of Eclipse. That doesn't mean you can't have multiple instances of Eclipse running with different working sets, but it can be a hassle none the less.
So, last time I saw Paul Kenny he, as usual, brought to my attention something which I previously had no idea existed: Working Sets. Working sets are really just collections of projects.
As an example, here's a long, unorganized list of projects:
As you can see, there's no organization here. Seeing as I've been doing a lot of work on the Alagad.com site, it would be nice if I could see only the relevant projects. To do this I first click on the menu arrow and click Select Working Set...
This shows me the Select Working Set dialog.
Seeing as I have no working sets I'll create a new one by clicking the new button. This shows the New Working Set dialog.
For my projects I've been selecting Resource (or Java - I can't see the difference between the two) and clicking next. In the resulting dialog I can select the projects I want in my working set.
Finally, I click finish and I am returned to the Select Working sets dialog where I now see my new Working Set.
If I select my working set and click OK my project list will refresh to show only the selected projects.
This is a really handy way to have Eclipse show only what I'm most interested in at the moment. Now that I have my Working Set created I can also quickly deselect it on or off though the same menu we started with.
19 responses to “Using Eclipse Working Sets Instead of Workspaces”
"One of my biggest gripes about Eclipse has always been the use of working sets to organize projects"
Don't you mean "workspaces" are your gripe?
I love working sets, I don't know how I would work without them.
@Chris - You're right. I fixed this. Thanks for pointing it out.
It's helpful. Thanks a lot. :)
Very nice. I've worked in Eclipse for a while and didn't know about this.
Not just projects. Package or directory views within projects as well. You can have a working set that just has your test subdirectories, or your docs.
I use working sets as a huge time-saver to limit scope for Search or Open Resources constantly.
Ver good
my god man, thank you! I've been trying to get my head around workspaces and this solves it all! Cheers!
Eclipse amazes me every day :)=
This was helpful. I've been working with Eclipse for years now, and never bothered to figure out what a working set was. Thanks for the post!
I'm so glad I found this! It solved all my problems. Thanks!
This post help me to organize multiple project !!!
Thanks for your explication !!!!
Thanks for this info! Useful. Don't like the way Eclipse uses workspaces either, compared to other editors/IDE's like UltraEdit or Visual Studio.
It's not even possible, as far as I know,
to double click on a project-file to open it in the IDE (default workspace or something).
Furthermore, if you use ClearCase, you can't have a project in different views (the same name, just different versions) and open/import them in a single workspace. Weird.
I agree that "working set" feature is reducing all the hassle with switching workspaces, but, geez! This feature should be clearly visible and accesible.
I like Eclipse for its flexibility, but from usability and ergonomics point of view it is nightmare...
Hmmm, maybe I haven't understand it very well, but I really prefer the way Netbeans manages project, withouth the notion of Workspace, only project groups. What do yo think?
I wish there was an option to save the currently opened set of editors as a working set. I've traced a problem down but have to work on other items. It would be nice to save the 'call tree' to open all at once when I am ready.
Will this prevent m2eclipse from constantly refreshing and bogging my entire system down, or is this more a way to just change the view to make it easier to navigate to what I'm most interested in.
it's helpful but still I can't add project locating other places from workspace to the workspace, this is the key question
Clearly I don't understand how to use working sets. When I change to a different one, searching (control-h) doesn't switch with the working set. I have to select it there... And "windows working set" doesn't limit the search to the working set.
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Yeah, it always amazes me when I see CFers switching workspaces all the time. It's such a cumbersome way to work!
I've always used Working Sets and have lots of them defined with different combinations of projects in each.
Good to see a blog post on this topic!
Posted By: Sean Corfield on Oct 29, 2007 at 12:00 AM