Tip: Saving Eclipse/FDT Preferences

I usually make a new workspace for every project that I create in Eclipse/FDT and I have to save out my preferences (as you can see on the downloads page) because every time you create a new workspace it resets the preferences to the default. When I originally wanted to do this I found that it wasn’t as easy as I expected so here is a quick rundown of exporting and importing your preferences in Eclipse.

To export, go to File > Export > General > Preferences. Type in your file name (I usually append a .prefs extension to mine, I think I saw that somewhere and just started to use that as a convention) and click Finish. The default settings should be fine.

To import, go to File > Import > General > Preferences. Click Browse to find your preferences file on your hard drive and then click Finish. Voila, all your preferences are loaded!

You’d think this would be as simple as a button in the preferences panel but it was kind of buried in this mess.

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1 Comment

I’ve heard that you can also, somehow, save your eclipse preferences in the repository along with the project.
That way when someone else check out your work from the repositoy, the project will uses the checked out settings.

I’m not sure that this is possible? can anyone confirm this. So far my googling effort returns the usual export to xml.

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