26 May 2009

Work with multiple workspaces in Eclipse

A workspace in eclipse consists of some projects and settings (for example code formatting). If you are working on different things it is useful to have multiple workspaces. My recommendation is that you create a shortcut for each workspace. In Windows create a new shortcut and set the target to:
"C:\Program Files\eclipse\eclipse.exe"
-data "C:\Documents and Settings\lennartsc\My Documents\workspace_test"
-showlocation Test
-vm "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_12\bin\javaw" -vmargs -Xmx900M

The data parameter is the location of your workspace. The showlocation parameter is useful when you Alt-Tab between different Eclipse instances so it is possible to distinguish between them. The vm parameter is not needed, unless you want to specify the JVM (useful if you are using Maven). The last parameter, Xmx is good is you want Eclipse to have more memory.