Eclipse Global Preferences

eclipse is good, but like any other tool: it gets better after i have it customized for my special needs. eclipse stores a lot of settings in the workspace, see my article about copy my workspace settings . but is there a way to apply some settings to every workspace? at least to the new ones? because importing/exporting the settings can get really tedious as i have many workspace.  and indeed, there are global settings in eclipse. and i want to have them changed…

warning: changing eclipse global preferences might break an eclipse installation. so better have a backup of the changed files at hand!

i’m using here the eclipse based codewarrior for mcu10.2 , but things are pretty much the same for any eclipse based product (see the documentation in defining your own global preferences ).

question: where are the global preferences stored? the first thing to check is the eclipse\configuration\.settings folder: here some plugins store their global preferences. for example: the recent workspace settings are in org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs.

#fri apr 06 16:46:14 cest 2012
recent_workspaces_protocol=3
max_recent_workspaces=10
show_workspace_selection_dialog=true
eclipse.preferences.version=1
recent_workspaces=c\:\\tmp\\wsp_test\nc\:\\tmp\\wsp_10.2

but what about all the other settings? looking at the codewarrior installation, inside the eclipse folder, i find the cwide.ini file.

cwide.ini file

this file defines the eclipse startup options for launching the ide (cwide.exe for codewarrior). the interesting part is this line:

-declipse.plugincustomization=cwide.properties

this tells eclipse to use the cwide.properties as a default configuration file. if i inspect that file, it has the following content:

org.eclipse.debug.ui/org.eclipse.debug.ui.switch_perspective_on_suspend=always
org.eclipse.debug.ui/org.eclipse.debug.ui.switch_to_perspective=always
org.eclipse.ui.editors/spellingengine=org.eclipse.cdt.internal.ui.text.spelling.cspellingengine

ok, that gives me an idea how settings could look like. but the question is: how to know the settings and syntax? what works (most of the time) is following approach:

1. launch eclipse with a new workspace
2. export the settings using file > export > general > preferences to a file
3. change the setting in window > preferences
4. export the settings using file > export > general > preferences to a different file
5. compare/inspect the exported information and find the settings
6. apply the settings to the cwide.properties file, without the /instance/ part
7. restart the ide and check if it works with a new workspace

the last check is necessary as not all settings might work that way, see this forum post .

this is maybe best illustrated with an example. i have configured my workspace to use 2 for tab width and to insert spaces for tabs:

changed preferences for tabs

if i compare the two exported .epf files, this gives me:

diffing eclipse preference files

that means the two following lines are configuring what i have changed:

/instance/org.eclipse.ui.editors/tabwidth=2
/instance/org.eclipse.ui.editors/spacesfortabs=true

for the cwide.properties file i need to cut off the /instance/ part, so i have this added to the cwide.properties :

# set tab width to 2
org.eclipse.ui.editors/tabwidth=2
# using spaces for tabs
org.eclipse.ui.editors/spacesfortabs=true

note: preferences are applied in following order: global preferences, then local (workspace) preferences

this does not overwrite an existing setting of my workspace. as i can see from above diff, my initial workspace settings do not have any settings for tabwidth and spacesfortabs. creating a new workspace use and apply my new settings. but once i have the them, they will not be overwritten with new global ones. which makes sense: the local settings are winning.

note: post a comment if you know an elegant way how to enforce/overwrite workspace settings with global ones.