Eclipse's "Workspaces" (Was: What you use D for?)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"David Gileadi" <foo at bar.com> wrote in message 
news:g0s8li$27jq$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> So, that means there are a few requirements (all somewhat interrelated):
>>
>> ------------
>> 1.
>>
>> There needs to be a three-level hierarchy that, regardless of 
>> terminology, boils down to:
>>
>> "Group of targets"->"Target"->"Sources/Assets"
>>
>> 2.
>>
>> If I'm working on "My Application", I don't want the workspace to 
>> distract me with all of the targets associated with "My Other 
>> Application" as well as every other little program I write using the IDE.
>>
>> 3.
>>
>> The "My Application" and "My Other Application" might be very different. 
>> For instance (all hypothetical), one might be a GameBoy Advance game I'm 
>> writing in plain old C, and the other an opensource Win32 email client 
>> written in Java and Lua on which I merely contribute, and maybe a third 
>> program/set-of-programs that's some big enterprisey thing for work using 
>> every damn language imaginable.
>>
>> 3A: While some settings should be associated with me as a user (ex: the 
>> highlighting settings for a given language, or text-editing keyboard 
>> shortcuts)...
>>
>> 3B: ...other settings should be specific to either "My Application" or 
>> "My Other Application" (ex: auto-formatting settings, certain panels 
>> opened/closed, certain panels resized differently).
>>
>> Eclipse's "Perspectives" sound like a potential semi-solution to this, 
>> but from my limited understanding of them, it sounds like they're not 
>> project-specific, and don't cover all the types of settings I'm talking 
>> about here.
>> ------------
>>
>> If Eclipse's Workspace is treated as a system-wide "user" concept, then 
>> you have a mere two-level hierarchy of "Project"->"Sources". So you're 
>> lacking the "Group of targets"/"Solution" level that ties together "My 
>> Application" with its associated utils/libs/etc, while assigning 
>> appropriate "Group Settings" to that entire group and nothing more than 
>> that group. This breaks requirements #1 and #3B.
>>
>> You could try to counteract this by treating "Workspace" as an ad-hoc 
>> "Group of targets"/"Solution" concept, but then not only do you get the 
>> awkwardness I mentioned in my previous post, but requirements #2 and #3A 
>> are broken.
>>
>> This could all be solved with, for example, a concept of "nested 
>> classes", or "a project consists of targets which have sources". But, I'm 
>> not aware of anything like this in Eclipse.
>>
>>
>
> I think you may be looking for the concept of Working Sets.  Basically, it 
> lets you pick the projects that are currently visible at the time. Here's 
> one dev's explanation (found via Google): 
> http://wbeaton.blogspot.com/2005/11/leanin-on-working-sets.html
>
> I always customize my perspective to add the Window Working Set item to my 
> toolbar (right-click on the toolbar and choose Customize Perspective..., 
> then select it under the Commands tab).  This lets me pick my active 
> working set(s) by just checking items in a dropdown menu.

Do Working Sets allow you to have certain settings set up differently 
between one working set and another working set (ie, #3B), or do you still 
have to do multiple workspaces for that? If Working Sets will do that, then 
that might very well reduce my problems with eclipse down to just 
responsiveness/bloat (I was just messing around with both Eclipse v3.3.2 and 
Visual C# 2008 Express yesterday, and Visual C# was noticably faster and 
more responsive).