Copying the UX group as this crossed into determining what the user experience should be.
While the preference recorder is a clever way to work around the problem, I’m not sure it’s what users are expecting. At least the version I saw of it, it should be recording all preferences without asking the user because as soon as you ask, the smart
users realize it’s a workaround, the beginner users wonder why it’s asking.
We really should be storing workspace preferences globally. Then if you’re a super advanced user who wants different preferences per workspace, we can come up with a workaround for that.
If Oomph can do that, then great, but then we need to make sure all Eclipse IDEs (at eclipse and elsewhere) have Oomph in it. That is, it should be in the Platform.
I also believe that the old habit of using multiple workspaces is something that confuses users and hide the power of Eclipse. Keeping a single workspace is often simpler, and you really can have hundreds of projects open simultaneously for different languages.
What could we do to "educate" existing users to not care about workspaces and always work in the same one?
Not sure that’s the right direction. Visual Studio Code, for example does have the concept of multiple “workspaces”. You open it up in a root directory and have have multiple instances of it open at different roots. Visual Studio has the concept of Solution
which is similar. Xcode, mind you, does not and you open and close projects.
The main problem here is that java projects tend to be small and numerous and there’s just too much noise if you have your IDE checked out (like I do with Momentic’s 400 projects or so from all over the Eclipse ecosystem) and then want to work with an
Android app project for example which would get lost in the noise.
But yes, workspaces are a problem it would be nice to understand the root cause of those user experience problems so we can come up with something really better.
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