Eclipse: Nested Editor Tabs? - eclipse

Is anyone aware of any method (or external plugin) that would allow for nested editor tabs? It would be nice to be able to group related open files into their own "master" tabs, but I'm not sure if this is even possible. Any ideas?

This is totally non-obvious, and I discovered it by accident, but...
If you click on a tab and start dragging it downwards, once you get more than half-way down the editor pane, a horizontal line will appear. Let go, and now you'll have two different editor panes, each with tabs of documents. Now you can drag tabs up and down between the two panes to see different documents at the same time.
I think that's as close as you can get.

I think the best you can currently do is "Window->New Window" and then use each new window as a separate "tab" of related editors. Not exactly ideal, I admit.
It's a cool idea though, especially if you could have shortcuts or something that open groups of editors with a single command.

This definitely isn't possible in the current RCP. You might be able to construct an editor component which created a CTabFolder and delegated to other editor components, but I'm not sure how well that would work.

There are Perspectives in Eclipse that you might use to achieve something close, they are more global things though...
But I agree with you, I would like this feature as well! This would be also very useful when editing many files that have the same name but come from different packages, because now it's a mess >_<

For me the utility of such a feature is to reduce context switching time. I'm working on project A, have lots of editors open, now I need to drop that and work on project B. I want to keep all the editors open associated with project A but hide them while I work on B. When I'm done with B, I can pick up right where I left off in A without having to find and open all those A files again; I can even leave them unsaved indefinitely, since Juno never crashes!! :)
I have used the New Window feature, and it's great, but the new window needs a bunch of configuration (closing Views I don't need, moving stuff around to where I want it, opening Views I had open in the old window, and so on) before I can get to work. It also uses a lot more memory than a simple tab group would since it seems to be a complete new copy of Eclipse.
The split-window feature is great and I use it all the time. It is indeed tab groups, and if there were a way to hide a tab group, and for each tab group to have its own tab list (the thing you get when you click ">>5" so you can see editors you have open that don't fit in the tab header), it would totally fill the bill.

Related

Multiple editor windows with multiple tabs

Very often I work with multiple projects in MATLAB and have a group of files for each project that I access at one time. Having all files of all projects open causes a lot of clutter in the workspace. One can do this for one single set of files by docking which is well known.
Is there a way to tab projects, or have multiple MATLAB editors (for each project) open with multiple tabs in each (with the projects files). The question can be found here too. In the same vein, are there other code editors which can be used to perform the same?
Project1
file 1.m
file 2.m
file 3.m
file 4.m
Project2
file 1.m
file 2.m
file 3.m
file 4.m
Either in the same window, or in different windows.
Unfortunately I don't believe MATLAB can do that kind of project/file management for you, which is why I use Sublime Text 2. It's perfect for that kind of project/file management... and not to mention the awesome shortcuts and quick editing tools to help you code faster.
Check them out: http://www.sublimetext.com/. The one drawback is that it's nagware. It is free to use, provided you can bare the popups to buy a copy of the software every now and then. Once you buy it, the popups go away. Give it a try and see how it goes!
If someone still need a solution for that-
You can just drag a tab of one file to the side, or bottom of the space of the editor, like that:
And the result will be:
Now you can drag in the same way other tabs to the new tabs group, and you have two separate tabs groups (but one Editor window..). You can of course drag the middle edge line to the right-end, and work fully only with the first group, or drag it to the left-end and work fully with the second one.
Note for one drawback here- if the line is in one of the ends, you don't see the tabs status and files names of the hidden group, and if you forget that you opened some file there and try to open it again, you will not see it opened, or any change in the IDE, because the control goes to the already opened tab but you not see it.

Eclipse PDT Differentiating file name tabs for MVC?

When working with MVC in Eclipse you might often have a model, view, and controller all with the same name open at the same time. When looking at each of the file tabs, you won't always know which is which and have to click through them, which can be quite a hassle sometimes. I've heard of being able to color code files based on the path in some editors. For example, tabs with path model could be set as green, path controller set as yellow, etc. Is this possible in Eclipse, or is there a plugin for something like this? If not, what do you do to more easily differentiate between the tabs? I've heard of people always opening a MVC set in a certain order. So you'll know the leftmost tab is the controller, the right most is the view, etc. However, that must also mean you need to open all 3 files each time. Any better tips or tricks?
Another thing about the file tabs that can be annoying is that when you have more files that can't fit in one line, eclipse pushes off to an arrow which you have to click to see the rest. It seems to be random which tabs get pushed off there, maybe the least used ones, I have no idea... This coupled with the problem above gets kind of annoying. I was trying to find a way to disable this and just show tabs that can't fit in one line to show up on a second line, but surprisingly couldn't find such an option (then again you also can't wordwrap without a plugin).
Hopefully there are some solutions to these two problems. Thanks.
Maybe this can be helpful
http://www.dipherence.com/2011/03/20/full-coloured-eclipse-navigator-plug-in/
With the latest version of Eclipse (Kepler 4.3.1, build M20130911-1000) when two or more files with the same base name are opened, tab will show also the parent directory name.

How can I close an empty pane in Eclipse

I often end up with lots of empty panes in Eclipse that can only be minimized but not destroyed. How do I close these?
Update:
In this screenshot you can see two minimized on the upper left and several on the right hand side. In the center are four more. They only seem to be restorable in the Debug mode.
http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/9900/eclipse1.png
this happened to me, too. What worked for me (based on FilmJ and douncon's comments) was to open a class file, then drag that tab over the top of the empty pane.
Select Window -> Reset Perspective. That should reset the current perspective (what you call "mode") to its' initial state, (hopefully) closing all irrelevant views.
Something seems terribly wrong with your Eclipse. Maybe you should reinstall it. It is possible that you installed a buggy plugin.
First of all, what do you mean by pane? Eclipse has:
Windows (Eclipse itself, e.g. instance)
Documents (tabs)
Views (properties, tasks, explorer, etc)
If by 'pane' you mean document editors, you have problems either with your Eclipse version or most likely one of the installed plugins.
Each View also can be closed (except maybe some project types (perspectives) of which I'm not aware). For CDT (C/C++) you can close practically everything.
I'll recommend you download latest Eclipse version with no plugins, extract it to different folder, and check if that happens again. If yes, please explain more in details (like Eclipse version, perspective you are using, any side plugins, etc).
Also a good places are Eclipse community forum, mailing list and bugz :-)
I had the same problem. For me it helped to go into the right perspective and activate the functionality that caused the window in the first place. Once I reactivated the functionality, in my case "QNX Memory Analysis perspective", I was able to close all the windows one by one.
The conclusion is you have to refill the empty windows with content and then you will be able to close them properly.
So, it's really very easy for this to happen, if you open an editor that's incompatible with the existing editor, you can often end up having to place it outside of the tab list in one of your editor panes, then you might clear or copy that, typically while trying to add that view to a tab list.
In any case, what it's done is create a new editor, and all you need to do is drag some file to that empty editor window giving it some form of context, then close it.
I had the same issue. I followed #zvikico, but instead of just resetting, I first reset and then closed all the perspectives. Please follow the following to fix the problem. It worked for me:
Window -> Perspective -> Reset perspective..
After resetting follow below:
Window -> Perspective -> Close All Perspectives

Is it possible to work in Eclipse with keyboard only?

as most of us surely do every now and then, I try to improve my workflow. As Eclipse is my main IDE, I wondered if it may be possible to use it without mouse. I browsed the available shortcuts and tried to use them instead of my mouse. I found interesting features like Ctrl+3 which opens something like the Apple spotlight.
I know there are a lot of questions concerning favorite shortcuts etc. but I'd like to know if it works because at the moment it feels a bit squishy 100% without mouse.
So is anyone out there using Eclipse like that? And are there some hints to ease the change?
Yes, it is possible. For a start, check out 10 Eclipse navigation shortcuts every java programmer should know. When you use these 10 shortcuts and some of the shortcuts of the comments, you will already see a big performance boost.
The "open type" and "open resource" dialogs are CamelCase-sensitive, so when typing "NPE" in the open type dialog, I get two matching items NoPermissionException and NullPointerException. So using good names with consistent spelling is a must.
Ctrl+F11 starts a program, F11 debugs it. Note howewer to check if in Window-Preferences-Run/Debug-Launching the value of "Launch Operation" is set to your needs.
You may want to customize the search dialog (Ctrl+h) to only show the file search (default is to context sensitively present you with different search tabs).
Ctrl+n allows you to create something new (opens a wizard with an initial filter text to filter the possible next pages).
I'm a blind programmer who uses eclipse. While there are plenty of shortcuts I find people often overlook using menus from the keyboard. If there's a function you use a lot that doesn't appear to be supported with keyboard shortcuts you can either create a shortcut to it in prefferences or use keyboard shortcuts such as alt+f to access the file menu and a one letter combination that allows you to access the item. For example hit alt+f then a to access the save as dialog. The underlined letter is the one you want to hit once in the menu.
There are a couple of things you can do to improve your keyboard:mouse usage ratio with Eclipse.
First off, if you push Ctrl-Shift-L, it shows you a master list of all the shortcuts you can use. If you know what you want to do, this is usually a quicker way of doing it without having to dig through menus, and as a bonus, you will learn some shortcuts you didn't know before.
The other thing you can try is a plugin called MouseFeed which looks promising. It tells you the shortcut for any menu item you use and if there isn't one, reminds you to create one. It essentially acts as training wheels until you become as close to 100% keyboard use as possible. I'm not sure how well it works in 3.4, but you can give it a shot.
Hope that helps.
Here you get an Eclipse Shortcut Overview PDF file of all key bindings. This file you can print and put beside your keyboard if you wish.

Source Editor Tab order in Netbeans 6.5

I recently switched to Netbeans from Eclipse, and the one thing that I liked about Eclipse I'd like to get in Netbeans:
The order of the tabs at the top of the Source Editor in Eclipse seems to be related to most recently used, so if I have a group of 5 files I'm working on at one time, they are all likely to be visible in the tab list, no matter how many tabs I have open.
In Netbeans, this isn't the case - I don't know what the order is, but it isn't useful for switching between my active files quickly - its usually faster to re-open the file to switch to the correct tab than to actually use the tab system.
Is there an option setting or a plugin that can change this behavior to something more like Eclipse?
By default the tabs in NetBeans are ordered acording to when they were opened. I don't think there's a way how to change it right in NetBeans and don't know about any plugin neither. I think this behaviour is just a matter of taste - I was used to NetBeans behaviour and when I'm using Eclipse, I always get confused about shuffled tabs. But as Kevin said you can drag the tabs to change their order.
When you press CTRL + TAB, the documents in the popup window are ordered acording to last used. This might be usefull for you.
Another (partial) solution might be docking a documents window (Window -> Documents) which contains opened documents and where documents are ordered alphabetically. It's better than re-openenig the files (as you wrote) especially if youre files are spread in different packages and you can't see them in projects/files view on one screen.
I don't think it does. However, you can drag the tabs to the positions you want them in. I would suggest just ordering by your liking manually.