Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Enhance your navigator by decorating resources

Is your project explorer stuffed with too many projects? Are you looking for a way to get more structure into this? I was suffering from this problem for a long time now, having workspaces with 50+ projects in it. I am using Working Sets and Mylyn, still I sometimes get lost within all my resources.

Resource Decorator Plugin

So I came up with a nice little plugin that allows to add custom decorations to your resources. Eg you could set a dedicated background color for all your projects that fit to a dedicated name pattern. You could also set the foreground color for all your src folders or highlight plugin.xml files.


The Resource Decoration is accessible through the Navigator context menu, which contains some quick decorations and a generic wizard that allows to fine tune your settings. There you can build generic filters by creating a tree structure. The Resource filter will match a resource path within your workspace. This will always be an exact match. The RegExp filter takes a regular expression to match it against the resource name. You have to use drag and drop to build your filters, DEL will remove a selected filter along with its children.


To alter decorations you can go to Preferences / General / Appearance / Resource Decorator. Take care that the Resource Decorator is enabled in Preferences / General / Appearance / Label Decorations (which should be the default setting).


The tool is at a very early stage as the interface is a little rough and filtering is a bit limited so far. Yet it is working, save and quite useful to me.

Installation

When you are interested in this little helper you can install it from

http://codeandme.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/at.pontesegger/at.pontesegger.resourcedecorator.releng.p2/target/repository

Please use the bugtracker at googlecode to report any issues or additional ideas.

The whole project is available under EPL, source code is located at Google code.

6 comments:

  1. Hi there,
    this looks nice but It failed to install on my Eclipse Indigo.
    he is the error
    Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
    Software being installed: Resource Decorator 1.0.0.201302272049 (at.pontesegger.feature.resourcedecorator.feature.group 1.0.0.201302272049)
    Missing requirement: Resource Decorator 1.0.0.201302272049 (at.pontesegger.resourcedecorator 1.0.0.201302272049) requires 'bundle org.eclipse.ui [3.103.0,4.0.0)' but it could not be found
    Cannot satisfy dependency:
    From: Resource Decorator 1.0.0.201302272049 (at.pontesegger.feature.resourcedecorator.feature.group 1.0.0.201302272049)
    To: at.pontesegger.resourcedecorator [1.0.0.201302272049]

    It seems not to find the "org.eclipse.ui" but it is installed of course.
    Any idea ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Same here. I want to try this plug-in so badly. We have currently 641 projects in the workspace and I am almost have a tennis elbow from scrolling. (using WorkingSets, etc.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I lowered the dependencies so it should work frm Eclipse Helios onward right now. I could not check on Helios/Indigo, so please report back when you get it working on one of these platforms.

      Delete
  3. I've been looking for something like this a long time. It seems to work well on Eclipse 4.2.2. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Instalation fails in Indigo with:
    Cannot complete the install because one or more required items could not be found.
    Software being installed: Resource Decorator 1.0.1.201303071257 (at.pontesegger.feature.resourcedecorator.feature.group 1.0.1.201303071257)
    Missing requirement: Generic Filters 1.0.1.201303071257 (at.pontesegger.filter 1.0.1.201303071257) requires 'bundle org.eclipse.ui.workbench [3.103.1,4.0.0)' but it could not be found
    Cannot satisfy dependency:
    From: Resource Decorator 1.0.1.201303071257 (at.pontesegger.feature.resourcedecorator.feature.group 1.0.1.201303071257)
    To: at.pontesegger.filter [1.0.1.201303071257]

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The error message states that org.eclipse.ui.workbench [3.103.1,4.0.0) is missing. I could still lower requirements here. Which version of Indigo do you use (plain, SR1, SR2)?

      Delete