Eclipse can make your life really easy when it comes to working with version control systems. Over the next few articles, I'll be sharing some of the tips that I've picked up while using Eclipse (with CVS).  When you make changes in your local workspace, the default decoration is a  '>' before the change, up to project level.  This is fine, but isn't particularly obvious when scanning through your workspace.

You can actually make these changes really stand out using some simple changes to your preferences.  You'll find the preferences on by navigating to Window/Preferences/Team/CVS/Label Decorations

On the Text Decorations tab you can change the default change flags:

On the general tab, you can change the colors and fonts of anything that has changed locally.
First, click through to the Colors & Fonts page.  This part of the preferences dialog allows you to customize the colors that are used.

Now, when you enable font and color decorations, your changes will be much more obvious:

Hopefully you'll find this as useful as I did. Eclipse is my everyday IDE, but I'm sure that similar settings exist in other Java IDEs. If so, please share how to access those capabilities with a response (or another article).