Saving Eclipse/FDT Preferences

Posted on

11/3/2007 in Tips & Tricks

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.