My friend and I are working as a team on a project through Dropbox. Previously I have used Eclipse and Eclipse would automatically update the files in view. Unfortunately every time we make a new change IntelliJ says this:
We then have to press Yes which then closes all of our tabs and is very annoying. Is there a way to disable this in IntelliJ? (We want it to work functionally equivalent to Eclipse if possible!)
I think this problem is caused not by changes in actual code files, but IDEA's configuration files, those that are in the .idea/ folder inside your project.
One way to resolve this would be to use Selective Sync to stop syncing configuration folder.
You can use the shortcut below to synchronize the classes.
ctrl + alt + y
And also check your intellij settings by navigating through HotSwap in File > Settings and then select Reload classes in background also you can use the shortcut as below to refresh.
ctrl + F5
I would suggest to stop using dropbox. Using git is a much better solution for collaboration, and there are free git services. There are even some that allow free private repos for smaller teams. IDE project files should generally not be part of your source code.
Also, there are additional benefits to using proper source code controls, such auditing and history, merging, and so much more.
Related
Which Eclipse files is it appropriate to put under source control, aside from the sources obviously?
In my project, specifically, I'm wondering about:
.metadata/*
project-dir/.project
project-dir/.classpath
project-dir/.settings/*
If there are any of these for which it depends, please explain your guidelines.
Metadata should not be managed in source control. They contain mostly data relevant to your workspace.
The only exception is the .launch XML files (launcher definition).
They are found in
[eclipse-workspace]\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.debug.core\.launches
And they should be copied into your project directory: When your project is refreshed, those configurations will be displayed in the "Run configuration" dialog.
That way, those launch parameter files can be also managed into the SCM.
(Warning: Do uncheck the option "Delete configurations when associated resource is deleted" in the Run/Launching/Launch Configuration preference panel: It is common to soft-delete a project in order to import it back again - to force a reinitialization of the eclipse metadata. But this option, if checked, will remove your detailed launch parameters!)
project-dir/.project
project-dir/.classpath
project-dir/.settings/*
should be in your SCM (especially .project and .classpath according to the Eclipse documentation).
The goal is that anyone can checkout/update his/her SCM workspace and import the Eclipse project into the Eclipse workspace.
For that, you want to use only relative paths in your .classpath, using linked resources.
Note: it is better if project-dir refers to an "external" project directory, not a directory created under the eclipse workspace. That way, the two notions (eclipse workspace vs. SCM workspace) are clearly separated.
As ipsquiggle mentions in the comment, and as I have alluded to in an old answer, you can actually save the launching configuration as shared file directly in your project directory. All launching configuration can then be versioned like the other project files.
(From the blog post Tip: Creating and Sharing Launch Configurations from KD)
I am currently working on a project where we have the .project and .cproject files under source control. The idea was that settings related to library paths and link directives would propagate across the team.
In practice it hasn't worked very well, merges almost always come back in a conflicted state which need to be deconflicted outside of eclipse and then the project closed and reopened for the changes to take effect.
I wouldn't recommend keeping them in source control.
It's worth nothing that CDT configuration files are not source-control-friendly. There's a bug filed for .cproject files changing very frequently and causing conflicts, see Sharing cdt-project files in repository always causes conflicts.
Some projects, like those using Maven, like to generate the .project files based on POMs.
That said, other than that - .metadata should NOT be in source control. Your project will have to make a determination about whether projectdir/.settings does, based on how you plan to manage standards and such. If you can honestly trust your developers to set up their environment based on the standard, and you don't have to customize anything special for any project, then you don't need to put them in. Me, I recommend configuring every project specifically. This allows devs to work on multiple projects' stuff in the same workspace without having to change default settings back and forth, and it makes the settings very explicit, overriding whatever their default settings are to match the project's standards.
Only difficult part is making sure they all stay in sync. But in most cases you can copy the .settings files from project to project. If there are any you specifically don't want in source control, do the equivalent of setting svn:ignore for them, if your SCM supports it.
The .classpath file is definitively a good candidate for checking into scm as setting it by hand can be a lot of work and will be difficult for new devs getting into the project. It is true it can be generated from other sources, in which case you would check in the other source.
As for .settings, it depends on the settings. This is a grey area, but some settings are almost mandatory and it is convenient to be able to check out a project, import it in Eclipse and have everything set up and good to go.
At our project, we therefore maintain a copy of the .settings folder called CVS.settings and we have an ant task to copy it to .settings. When you get the project from CVS, you call the 'eclipsify' ant task to copy the default settings to the new .settings folder. When you configure settings that are needed by everyone developing on the project, you merge those back into the CVS.settings folder and commit that to CVS. This way saving settings in SCM becomes a conscious process. It does require devs to merge those settings back into their .settings folders from time to time when big changes are checked in. But it's a simple system that works surprisingly well.
I'd say none of them. They most likely contain information that is relevant only to your workstation (I'm thinking about paths for libraries and all). Also what if someone in your team is not using Eclipse?
Consider:
.classpath
.project
.launch
These SHOULD be in version control as long as you stick to using project-relative paths. This allows other developers to check out the project and start working right away without having to go through all the setup pain that other developers went through as well.
You might be tempted to include .metadata in version control as well so Eclipse developers can check out an entire workspace and have it preconfigured with all the right projects, but it includes a lot of user specific information that anytime anybody works on it, it will change, so I would advise to NOT INCLUDE .metadata. It's easy to build a local workspace just by importing all existing Eclipse projects.
I have spent too many hours configuring eclipse workspace settings for new colleagues (and myself). What I ended up doing eventually was copying my own .metadata to the new developer machine.
If you are working on a team, then I think the following are very good candidates to keep under version control:
Installed JREs and their names
Server Runtime Environments
Java Editor Templates
Version Control Keyboard Shortcuts
Plugin settings that do not provide project specific settings
Maven settings
Preconfigured Perspectives
...
I haven't tried to put anything in .metadata under version control, but I'm using version control for these files for ten years now:
project-dir/.project
project-dir/.classpath
project-dir/.settings/*
The main reason is that Eclipse sometimes damages those files. Without version control, you will get weird and hard to track errors. With version control, you can immediately see "Why is it trying to deploy test classes???" or "Why is Maven and Eclipse using the same classpath?" (leading to https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=430605).
With version control, you can see when it happens and easily go back to a working set of config files.
If you use m2e: You can import the project now with the fast "Import existing project" instead of the slow "Import Maven project".
The drawback of this approach is that Eclipse seems to randomly change some of those files. Most plugins keep them stable but some use HashMap instead of, say, LinkedHashMap so the order of elements changes all the time. This means there is an additional step when you commit: Check for any modified settings and handle them, first.
It also means that the whole team has to agree on some standards: Like which warnings should be enabled. It's interesting that many people see this as a additional problem - as if they weren't working together.
In my experience, it takes a couple of weeks until those files stabilize. Partly because you gradually learn how to tweak Eclipse, partly because people learn what not to touch. You can think of this as lost time or time spent to improve the quality of your work environment (like keeping your desk uncluttered).
There is a bonus advantage of the "Commit settings first": It gets people to commit more often and in smaller pieces (i.e. more like "one thought at a time" instead of "on feature at a time plus a thousand of other, unrelated things that I just happened to stumble upton ... what was I working on again?").
As a seasoned developer, I've come to prefer the "small commits" way of working; it's just easier to stay on track and you tend to sort your thoughts and changes into smaller, more manageable steps. This helps to reduce the level of complexity. Everyone can juggle with one ball, no one can juggle with 20.
PS: For certain setting files, I have unit tests to make sure known errors don't creep in like the "trying to deploy tests" in WTP. That helps in the initial phase "commit everything, I'm too busy" phase.
I want to know if there is some good way to automatically configure Eclipse workspace of newly checked out project.
I've got a project where I use gradle to both build and configure all of its subprojects. Since I want to enforce some good practices I also use e.g. FindBugs plugin, and tweaked Eclipse configuration (more/better compiler warnings, formatting, favorites, save actions and so on).
I think that storing .metadata directory in git is not a good idea - a lot of settings works only for certain version and breaks after update, some settings are stored in binary files and so on.
Build-in import/export tool handles only some settings - AFAIK it leaves e.g. save actions, favorites and formatting alone and don't handle them.
Then there's Workspace Mechanic plugin that allows to record settings change - but it doesn't allow to update existing record, only create new file or override old one, which leaves me with a lot of tasks to run - and it's not bug free: several times file_export_version=3.0 line was placed in a wrong place, so some settings couldn't be imported until I fixed that manually, and few times after import installation stopped working correctly... (even though I imported settings that I just exported!).
Do you have some good, automated, portable solution? Perhaps some tweaked way of using already mentioned tools? It might be more complicated that just running one script - I just want to make sure that all of changes are applied, I didn't miss anything, I don't have to change each and every option manually and it will still work when I apply it to an upgraded Eclipse.
There's a Workspace Preferences Transferrer that might help you. It allows you to transfer pretty much all (yeah, not just all) of the current workspace preferences to the new one when switching.
For my personal case it misses only one setting (look'n'feel) - so all in all it saves a lot of time compared to doing it manually.
Based on my understanding on your query
Clone a new git repo and point the same repo location as your eclipse workspace . Import your projects by referring to the same git repo itself. By this way all the changes in your code will automatically be reflected in the local git repo and you can push the code to remote later
Hope this is what you require
I'm using Eclipse for development because of all the things IntelliJ can't do (e.g. highlight all instances of a variable) and because IntelliJ is dog slow over a remote connection. But because I still don't have Maven integrated completely into Eclipse, I have to switch back to IntelliJ to compile and run my project using Tomcat.
How can I tell IntelliJ to detect all files that have changed on the file system and recompile them? (I don't want to manually open each changed file to get IntelliJ to detect the change.) In Eclipse I would just Refresh the project tree [1]...
Footnotes:
Eclipse has a feature (named "Refresh Using native hooks or polling") which you can enable to automatically detect changes and synchronise the perspective when any underlying changes are detected in the filesystem (see images below). This is quite handy and eliminates the need to manually refresh the project when using build tools - where files/directories get created in the project directory structure.
Is there anything similar for Intellij (explicit setting or otherwise) that eliminates having to click a button to synchronize the view with filesystem changes?
You can use the "synchronize" button (two yellow arrows) or in short Ctrl+Alt+Y
Intellij can highlight variable instances, you just need to enable it .
Further, if you invoke compile project, Intellij will just compile changed files (and hotswap when possible, if you are in debug mode & deploying to e.g. tomcat)
Right click on your Project in the left pane and click on "Synchronize"
You can see the status in the round circling icon at the bottom left of the IDE
I know this question was posted a few years ago, but maybe this info will help someone in the future. I was actually looking into a similar issue, and doing the following worked for me:
Go to Settings > Build, Execution, Deployment > Compiler and make sure "Make project automatically" is checked.
Click File>Synchronize (or) shortcut ctrl+Alt+Y
There is a synchronise button in the tool bar. Click it and it will refresh the project explorer
I enjoy using NetBeans, especially for development with Maven, however, I've found recently that I've been working with three different branches of the same code base in different parts of the development cycle.
One of the things that Eclipse can do is separate the projects into different workspaces, so I can simply start Eclipse with the workspace containing my Maven projects in the production patch branch or the trunk depending upon what I need to be working on.
I'd love to accomplish this in NetBeans, but haven't found a way to do so. Any ideas?
I am using Mac OS with version 6.7.1.
There is the option of project group.
In File > Project group.
In here you can create a project group based on a folder location, so any projects underneath this folder will be considered within this project group.
When switching between project groups only projects within are displayed, and it maintains the current status of opened files, etc.
Switching between project groups doesn't require closing the IDE.
Given those options I believe this would be equivalent to the workspace switching in Eclipse.
I've found two things:
First there is a "similar" feature. It involves using the userdir switch on the command line. The downside being you would need to restart your IDE rather than switching while open. I think I can live with that for the time being. I found the technique here for Windows:
Create a shortcut on your desktop to the Netbeans executable: C:\Program Files\NetBeans x.x\bin\netbeans.exe
Right-click on the shortcut and click "Properties".
In the "Target" textbox, add the extra parameter to the very end: --userdir C:\path\to\new_workspace
Click "OK" to exit the Properties window and double click the shortcut. Netbeans will launch and create/load the workspace at that location
Secondly, someone has submitted a feature to allow for workspace switching (or in this case userdir switching) from the IDE itself. Perhaps this will be rolled into 7.0.
Well Netbeans has a group so you can create a group of projects which you want to say put in a eclipse workspace otherwise.
So when you switch a group it's like switching workpsace in eclipse
I know, that this question is old, but I found it on google, while I was searching for a tool like the following:
http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/20677/project-group-toolbar
With that plugin, you can load different projects in your projects overview.
So you can have two or more projects open and change to another "set" of projects.
Neither projects or project groups do not work in a similar way as an Eclipse workspace (yet) as far as I know. When switching workspaces in Eclipse, all the files opened will be closed and the ones in the new project will be opened. In this way, all projects work as one entity. The netbeans project/project groups do not work in that way. I hope there will be such a feature soon cause that really helps if you have many windows open and you switch between projects
I'm looking for solution and finally use Project Group solution, this feature has been improved and easy to use.
Userdir is a good solution at first (i tried to use it first), but "workspace switching" feature doesn't exists, so I have to use different shortcut for different workspace. Finally I used Project Group
NetBeans' equivalent is the "Project". In your project explorer you can right click on the current project and close it. Then go to File > Open Project and select a different branch. You will have to create a new project from each branch of your code.
Eclipse (3.4.2 with PyDev) deals with out-of-sync resources (files that have been edited outside of the IDE) differently from other IDEs that I've used, where only resources with editors open are considered out-of-sync. In Eclipse, any resource can go out of sync.
This means that when I perform a search after any file has changed outside of Eclipse, I get an error dialog telling me that files are out of sync, even if they have no open editors. As far as I can tell, there is no global refresh command, so I'm forced to read the project names (I have several projects) in the error dialog, and do a right-click + refresh for each of them.
I've checked the Refresh Automatically setting in Settings > General > Workspace, but this has no effect. Is there any way to get Eclipse to always just load non-active resources from disk?
This issue will be fixed in Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo). While "Refresh Automatically" does eventually bring resources back into sync, the refresh hook only exists for Windows, so on Linux and Mac OS it has to poll the filesystem periodically.
From 3.7 there's a new preference Settings > General > Workspace > Refresh On Access (aka Lightweight Refresh). This preference causes Eclipse to automatically refresh resources when it discovers that they're 'out-of-sync'. When opening, reading or searching files, it'll prevent out-of-sync errors from occurring.
See also: https://bugs.eclipse.org/303517
I think if you click on the project node in the Project Explorer and press F5 or right click and select Refresh, all resources for that project will be refreshed. Also, if you CTRL+click on multiple projects, you should be able to refresh multiple projects at the same time.
A single click on a project, a CTRL+A to select everything, and an F5 should do exactly what you need - refresh everything.
I'll have to test this when I get the chance, but I believe this is how I overcame similar problems in the past.
I've noticed that this answer routinely is getting down voted. I'd like to point out that the question refers to a specific version of Eclipse: 3.4.2. There was actually no automatic method to refresh out-of-sync resources until version 3.7 Indigo of Eclipse, as mentioned in James Blackburn's answer. The method described in this answer is the only method to achieve this in version 3.4.2 (and any other version before 3.7 Indigo).
Out of synchronization problem is common in eclipse IDE so you have to check this option windows -> preference -> Workspace -> refresh using native hooks or polling.
Eclipse Helios possesses a built in refresh feature at Preferences > General > Workspace. It's in the same spot where you disable automatic builds. Select refresh automatically. A plugin with the same functionality is Andrei Loskutov's Filesync Plugin. The update site address is: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/. During installation, select Eclipse 3.5-3.7 plugins > FileSync.
Given that Java 7 has an api for filesystem hooks, one would think that refresh could be handled better in Eclipse.
Edit: Actually, there is a plugin that uses this mechanism: https://github.com/psxpaul/EclipseJava7Refresher
There is a global refresh - have nothing (or everything) selected in the package explorer and press F5 (or right-click on empty space and select Refresh). Of course, this could take rather long if you have large projects.
The global refresh actually exists in plain Eclipse without any plugins and without selecting every project in your workspace.
Basically you need to deselect everything in your project explorer and hit F5. To do that Ctrl+click the selected resource in the project explorer and hit F5.
A global refresh is really missing in Eclipse. The above procedure with selecting all projects and then running refresh (e.g. F5) does not work if you have closed projects included in your selection. This means, if you have 1/2 of your many projects closed as I do, you find yourself manually Ctrl-clicking through your dozens of projects. This is quite painful. I wish Eclipse would simply ignore closed projects.
Perhaps you should add a feature request on the eclipse site:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/
I think it would be a great idea to add a preference for automatically refreshing out of date resources.
Yes, Refresh on Access is long overdue ... those answers to this and similar enquires usually suggested enabling the global auto-refresh, which could take an age for large remote projects.
In fact there are those who would say that Refresh on Access should have been the original (< 3.x) default behaviour ...
I managed to solve this by creating a new "external tool" run config that executes a blank batch file. In the run config, you can have it refresh the workspace when complete. Then I created a macro using Practically Macro that 1) executes the last external tool run config (refreshing the workspace), then 2) executes the last debug run config (running my app). If you uncheck "Allocate console" then the completed external tool entry won't show up in the debug window.
Even if the solutions proposed by others perso are indeed correct, you have a "Refresh All" plugin for Eclipse. Simply add the Update page to your Eclipse list of update sites to install it in your IDE.
For Starting up there is an option to automatically refresh files in
Window -> Preferences -> General -> Startup and Shutdown -> Refresh workspace on startup
Click it in order to have a "fresh" start in eclipse. :)
Version: Eclipse 4.12