Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide

Perspectives

A perspective is a set of views, editors, and toolbars, along with their arrangement on your desktop. Think of a perspective as a way of looking at your work that is optimized for a specific kind of task, such as writing programs.

As you perform a task, you may rearrange windows, open new views, and so on. Your arrangement is saved under the current perspective. The next time you have to perform the same kind of task, simply switch to that perspective, and Eclipse will put everything back the way you left it.

To switch perspectives, select Window → Open Perspective or click on the Open Perspective icon (to the right of the main toolbar). This will bring up a list of the most commonly used perspectives; select Other… to see the full list.

Eclipse comes with several perspectives already defined; these are shown in Table 3.

Table 2-2. Built-in Eclipse perspectives

Perspective	Purpose
Resource	Arrange your files and projects.
Java	Develop programs in the Java language.
Debug	Diagnose and debug problems that occur at runtime.
Java Browsing	Explore your code in a Smalltalk-like environment.
Java Type Hierarchy	Explore your code based on class relationships.
Plug-in Development	Create add-ins to Eclipse.
CVS Repository Exploring	Browse a source code repository, including its files and revision history.
Team Synchronizing	Merge changes you've made with those of your teammates.

Each perspective has a set of views associated with it that are open by ...