Eclipse: Starting fresh a little less Painful
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Having problems with a corrupted Eclipse instance like line number not showing up or some other funky issue and you swear you have done all the correct steps to get it to work. Maybe starting with a fresh version of Eclipse is the best route.
Most people think of restarting with a pristine version of Eclipse as a hassle, you have to reset all your update sites, get your projects, and other small time consuming tasks.
Here are two tricks to make this process a little less painful. Exporting your update site list and getting your projects back quickly. I am using Eclipse SDK Version: 3.3.2 so depending on your Eclipse version it maybe slightly different.
Exporting Update Site:
Help —> Software Updates —> Find and Install —> Search for new features to install —> Export sites…
This will create a xml file you can then use to import your site list into the pristine version of Eclipse following the same process but using "Import sites…"
Then install the plugins you want.
So you have all the plugins but your Navigator has none of your old projects.
Restoring your projects:
Right-click in the Navigator view and select Import…
Then select General —> Existing Projects into Workspace
In the next screen put your C drive or equivalent in the "Select root directory:" input field and select Next. Eclipse will search your drive and find any project folder. You can them select which project folders to add and select Finish.
Now you have your plugins and projects, it is just a little work adding your views and arranging to your liking.
Nice Mike!
Does the export project handle SVN?
@Jim - The importing "Existing Projects into a Workspace" will recongize if the existing project folder was using SVN with Subclipse or Subversive. I noticed the export --> "archive file" but i think it actually will zip up the whole project folder/files. I saw export --> preferences also. I wonder if that would give you any customizing of Eclipse from preferences so you won't have to redo those.
"workspace preferences -- Preferences that are bound to workspaces. Use File > Export > Preferences from within Eclipse." http://tinyurl.com/64k8wk
Except that creating a new instance forgets your old preferences. You have to reconfigure those in the new one.
Won't exporting the preference File > Export > Preferences resolve reconfiguring your old preferences?