Eclipse UI Overview

Eclipse provides perspectives, views and editors. Views and editors are grouped into perspectives. All projects are located in a workspace.

2.1. Workspace

The workspace is the physical location (file path) you are working in. You can choose the workspace during startup of eclipse or via the menu (File-> Switch Workspace-> Others).

All your projects, sources files, images and other artifacts will be stored and saved in your workspace.

Tip

To predefine the workspace you can use the startup parameter -data path_to_workspace, e.g. c:\eclipse.exe -data "c:\temp" Please note that you have to put the path name into brackets.

Tip

To see the current workspace directory in the title of Eclipse use -showLocation as additional parameter.

2.2. Perspective

A perspective is a visual container for a set of views and editors.

You can change the layout within a perspective (close / open views, editors, change the size, change the position, etc.)

Tip

A common problem is that you closed a view and don't know how to re-open this view. You can reset a perpective it to it original state via the menu "Window" -> "Reset Perspective".

Eclipse allow you to switch to another perspective via the menu Window->Open Perspective -> Other.

For Java development you usually use the "Java Perspective".

2.3. Views and Editors

A view is typically used to navigate a hierarchy of information or to open an editor. Changes in a view are directly applied.

Editors are used to modify elements. Editors can have code completion, undo / redo, etc. To apply the changes in an editor to the underlying resources, e.g. Java source file, you usually have to save.