It's all a matter of taste. Do you like to have just one workspace for all your projects, or do you prefer to have multiple separate workspaces?

Sure, the first way seems to be the official, supported. It should be easy to manage the workspace -- given the tools like working sets (and working set filters), mylyn and the ability to close projects.

But I still don't get it.

I hate when my workspace is overflowing with projects, I want to have as many workspaces as projects.

So I create new workspace and live happily ever after.

But wait -- all my settings are gone. All my carefully crafted custom templates, all my keybindings, my font settings, everything is gone.

It's all text, fortunately

Lucky us. All eclipse settings are saved as a plain text in the workspace directory. So if you want to create new workspace, but preserve your settings, I have two answers for you:

The short answer

All settings are stored in the .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings directory. I mean -- all relevant settings. If you look into .metadata/.plugins directory there are many more directories with settings, but they are too project specific. I've walked trough these configuration files one by one, believe me, nothing useful lies hidden there.

So the short answer is: If you want to create a new eclipse workspace and preserve all your settings, simply copy the .metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings directory into your new workspace directory.

Do not copy other directories! There are project specific settings and since your old projects are left in your old workspace, the copied settings would not be valid and you would get some nasty exceptions at eclipse startup.

The long answer

Let the code do the talk for me.

I have created a (simple) shell script that automates new workspace creation. The downside is that it requires either a *nix shell or windows with cygwin. Nevertheless, you can always manually copy the .settings directory (see the short answer). The script has been tested by me, I and myself so it should work (most of the time).

To use it, save it somewhere, make it executable (chmod +x new-workspace.sh) and run it either in interactive mode

./new-workspace.sh -i

where it will ask you the details, or with paths to your workspaces (the new workspace directory will be created for you, just specify the path)

./new-workspace.sh old-workspace new-workspace 

The script will create new workspace directory and copy the relevant settings from your old workspace.

If it doesn't work for you, drop me a comment. Feel free to improve it.

Update: the pastebin page expired (although I'd swear I checked the keep forever option), so I moved the script over to github.