How do you organize 100+ projects in Eclipse?

eclipse organization project-structure multiple-languages
Trevor Boyd Smith picture Trevor Boyd Smith · Jun 10, 2011 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

When you have 5+ languages and 100+ projects, IMO the default of using one workspace is not acceptable because the one workspace becomes horribly disorganized. Having one huge unorganized workspace lowers your productivity.

The question:

What are the more advanced ways of using Eclipse when you have 5+ languages and 100+ projects? I would really appreciate advice that elaborates a little bit more than just giving one sentence like "use multiple workspaces" or "use working sets".

"Must have" requirements:

  • The project navigator only shows related projects (like only projects from abc language or only projects from xyz language)
  • The described method is currently being used by you or someone you know and has been used for more than two weeks

"Would like" requirements:

  • the ability to be able to have projects with the same name (like "helloworld" for language xyz and "helloworld" for language abc)

(Side note:

FYI, one of the reasons for asking on SO.com is because I have searched enough on Google to know that there are LOTS of people who have the same "Help my Eclipse workspace is out of control" problem. )

Answer

Andrew Eisenberg picture Andrew Eisenberg · Jun 11, 2011

The way I work with my hundreds of projects is this:

  • I have one big workspace where I have most of my projects. These projects are all tangentially related. I separate them into working sets. I tend to only show the working sets of the projects that I am working on currently. All other projects are closed.
  • Then I have a few more eclipse workspaces where I keep side projects that are completely independent from the big workspace. The eclipse installations for my side projects are usually different from the installation used by my big workspace because they are customized for the work required by the side project.

For example, my big workspace uses SpringSource Tool Suite, but my side-project workspaces are vanilla Eclipse with m2eclipse installed.

I find that this works well as long as I don't have too many projects opened at once in my big workspace.

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