Categories
Eclipse

Configure Eclipse on First Launch

The first time you run Eclipse, you’re presented with a dialog that allows you to select a Workspace.

Workspace

Accept the default location for your Workspace.

%USERPROFILE%\workspace

Check “Use this as the default and don not ask again”.

Note: If you’re reinstalling Eclipse, you mustn’t reuse the same default location for your workspace – this will corrupt your Eclipse installation. I learned this the hard way because I’d been using C:\Users\Chris\workspace, and I wanted to use that directory again; so I made a copy of it and saved it (into E:\Safe\workspace), and then cleaned C:\Users\Chris\workspace.

Check for updates

Before you start installing addins to Eclipse, make sure you’re working with the latest version (build) of Eclipse.

  • To update Eclipse, click Help > Check for Updates

    Check the Status Bar for the update task’s progress.

Set preferences

In Eclipse, click Window > Preferences, and then systematically go through the items in the hierarchical menu in the left pane – and check each item’s configuration.

General

Appearance

Enable: Enable Animations

Compare/Patch/ > Text Compare

Enable: Initially show ancestry pane

Error Reporting

Enter your name and e-mail address

Workspace

Enable: Save automatically before build

Enable: Show workspace path in window title

Text file encoding: Other > UTF-8

Ant

Editor

Enable: Mark occurrences of the selected element in the current buildfile

Install/Update

Automatic Updates

Enable: Configure Eclipse so it automatically updates each time you start it.

Java

Editor

Folding

Enable: Comments, Inner types, and Members

Hovers

Enable: Combined Hover

Typing

Enable: Automatically insert at correct position > Semicolons > Braces

Team

Enable: Show the file author in compare editors

Git

History

Enable: E-mail addresses in Author/Committer columns

Update errors

If the update process fails, throwing errors like this:

No repository found containing: osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.aether.api,1.0.1.v20141111

No repository found containing: osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.aether.connector.basic,1.0.1.v20141111

No repository found containing: osgi.bundle,org.eclipse.aether.impl,1.0.1.v20141111

Then you need to refresh the list of “Available Software Sites.”

To do so, select them all in Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites, and then click Remove.

Any easy way to add them back is to Import the file named bookmarks.xml with the following content:

bookmarks.xml
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>
<bookmarks>
<site url=”https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/” selected=”true” name=”Android Developer Tools (ADT)”/>
<site url=”http://download.eclipse.org/recommenders/updates/stable/” selected=”true” name=”Code Recommenders Stable Update Site”/>
<site url=”http://download.eclipse.org/releases/luna/” selected=”true” name=”Eclipse Luna”/>
<site url=”http://www.oxygenxml.com/InstData/Editor/Eclipse/site.xml” selected=”true” name=”oXygen”/>
<site url=”http://pydev.sf.net/updates/” selected=”true” name=”PyDev Update Site”/>
<site url=”http://resteditor.sourceforge.net/eclipse/” selected=”true” name=”ReST Editor Update Site”/>
<site url=”http://jautodoc.sourceforge.net/update/” selected=”true” name=”update site: http://jautodoc.sourceforge.net/update/”/>
</bookmarks>

Add common libraries

When I was experimenting with Java projects, I continually ran into instances where projects depended on external libraries (JSON, IO, etc.). After downloading a few of them, I simply downloaded several of them – so I’d always have then on hand.

To add the common libraries, visit:

 

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