How to save the "Package Explorer" in Eclipse

Question

Is it possible, to save the state of the package explorer when closing Eclipse (3.4) and to restore it when opening the workspace again?

By state I mean the nodes (expanded or collapsed).

Answer 1

I am not sure it is possible, but if you have the "Link with editor" button activated, you would open the relevant nodes as soon as you click on of of the editors you left opened (and restored on eclipse restart).

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Another way to restore the relevant state is to record some kind of context for a given task:
This is called mylyn

Answer 2

It's not possible. Apparently this used to be in the Package Explorer in the past, but it was removed for performance reasons. There is an outstanding enhancement request to add this to the Project (not package) Explorer. However because of the same performance issues, we will likely do something like make this a user option for the underlying Common Navigator (on which the Project Explorer is based).

Answer 3

"It's not possible."

I don't care who says "it's impossible", they're wrong. No feature this basic is "impossible" in software. Sounds like a UNIX guy saying the GUI is impossible. If the Eclipse guys can't figure it out (or can't be bothered), perhaps they should ask the guys at ADOBE who maintain Flex Builder (built with Eclipse!) which DOES provide this simple feature?

Makes it clear why paying for something more likely gets you what you want, where a free product will not. If the "Eclipse teams" pay check depended on this feature, suddenly "Oh it's possible just give us a few weeks."

So the answer is: yes it's possible, but you'll have to bribe the Eclipse team with a large donation of some kind first. (And supposedly all 'proprietary' stuff is evil - hah. Not if the customer likes getting what they need.)

Answer 4

The new version of Flex Builder (Flash Builder 4) has a package explorer just like Java's, and it remembers folder state just fine. The Flex Builder navigator did too.

Impossible? He he... maybe "impossible without payment in advance". It's not possible in the current version, but there's no serious reason it can't be added either.

I hope Eclipse team isn't looking to go commercial, so they can charge for basic "features" like this silliness. Don't follow in the Spring sell out footsteps.

Bottom line - if it really IS a performance problem in some massive application (maybe it is..), why not give the user an option to disable package explorer memory? Not every Java dev works on 50 person teams creating one million line enterprise applications. :)