Understanding the eclipse UI
The eclipse IDE might be quite overwhelming because of it's enormous offer of features to use. However everything is well structured and after you have a basic understanding of the layout I'm sure you will recognize the possibilities such a rich IDE can offer.
Before looking at the actual structure of the UI we should clarify a few common terms when talking about eclipse:
- A view is basically a part of the UI and most commonly you will see them as an extra tab within the main eclipse window. For instance an editor represents a view as well as the outline and the package explorer. Every view can be treated as a single window. Some of them offer the same symbols that are used in operating systems for maximizing/minimizing/closing and they work just the same. Furthermore every view can be maximized by double clicking on the corresponding tab.
Let's now have a look at the general structure of the UI:
- The yellow border shows the menu that is quite self-explanatory and the toolbar is located underneath. The toolbar can be seen as a sort of quick access to the menu. Right now none of them are really important for SQDev-users because currently SQDev does not include it's own menus.
- The grey border in the upper right corner shows the perspective-tab. A perspective is a pre-defined set of views that are shown. As well as the menu the perspective-tab is not yet of interest for you because SQDev does not yet provide it's own view.
- The red border refers to the package explorer as you can already read in the respective tab. The package explorer is where you will manage your files/scripts and even more important your projects. The package explorer feels a bit like the default explorer of an operating system: It has a folder structure that can be opened and closed (expanded and collapsed to be more precise). Furthermore it provides a rightclick context menu to do a variety of things. Most often you will use it for creating new files and projects (or for the deletion of the same).
- The green border in the middle shows where the editor is located. This will be the part you will be most of the time because it is used for the code-creation (what a surprise isn't it?)
- To the right of the editor you can see the purple border of the outline. The outline normally provides some sort of overview of your code. For you as an SQDev-user it is of no importance because SQDev will presumably not include an outline. SQF does not have the necessary structure for that. Therefore you can close the outline view if you wish to.
- Finally there is the black bordered view collection, which is basically just a panel with different views in it, accessible through tabs. Right now this collection has no important views for you in it.
If you close any of these views by accident you can **restore** them via the menu:
````Window -> Show View..````
If the desired view is not directly listed in the popup menu you can use the ````other...```` option to get a list of all available views.
Last but not least I want to mention that all these views are not fixed at their position. You can easily **drag and drop** the views to the position you want to. Just grab the tab of the view and pull it to the desired part of the main window.