How should I set up Eclipse when preparing for a presentation or demo?

Question

If I'm presenting code usually I show it in a syntax-highlighting text editor. But I've been doing more "live coding" in some presentations recently where it's important to show off some IDE tooling.

How should I set up Eclipse when preparing for a presentation or demo?

• Is there a way to save and switch out presenter settings?
• Is there a convenient way to increase font-size?
• Any neat tools or tricks worth mentioning? (Like ZoomIt or the zoom feature in OSX)

Answer 1

Experience from the very few presentations I've done:

• Low res for readable text
• Remove as much fluff from around the edges as possible
• Practice actually working in those conditions (learn keyboard shortcuts where possible, etc).

Answer 2

As graham.reeds says, but I prefer to crank up the font size rather than turn down the resolution.

Have everything you need for the presentation in its own workspace, so you don't get confused by all the real projects you normally work on. I once spent 30 minutes in a tutorial trying to work out why I couldn't get a test to pass, and discovered that I had been editing a test in one project but running a test with the same name in another. Luckily I had exercises for the audience to get on with in the meantime, but I wouldn't want to go through that embarrassment again!

Another benefit of a separate workspace is that style settings for presentation mode do not affect those for everyday work.

Also, turn off all apps that might pop something up during the presentation: mail monitors, instant messaging, etc.

Answer 3

"Is there a way to save and switch out presenter settings?"

Create a new "Perspective" for each specific task you are going to do at the conference. So when you develop at home you would use c++/java/debug perspective and then when you present you would use c++-presentation/java-presentation/debug-presentation perspective.

How to create the new perspective for each task:

• Copy your current development presentation
• Change to a lower resolution 800x600 or 1024x800
• Tweak all different sizes of each GUI item in each perspective and make sure it looks good on a presentation
• Get a bunch of feedback from friends to see what they think should change about your eclipse setup.

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Is there a convenient way to increase font-size?

You can change the font used by your OS and that will affect the font used by Eclipse. Or you can change the font from within Eclipse using:

• Menubar "Window" --> Menuitem "Preferences --> Left-textwindow "General" --> "Appearance" --> "Colors and Fonts"
• Double click the item you want to change the font for

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Any neat tools or tricks worth mentioning?

I'm sure there are... but presentations aren't about neat tricks. All the best presentations i've seen use very simple tools and the presentation is good because of the presenter's talking and interacting with the crowd. All the worst presentations i've seen depend on some neat trick that fails...

Answer 4

Try to find a good balance with an increased font size/lower resolution (whichever you choose to go with). Making the text large enough to read is great, but remember that this can often conflict with the characters-per-line limit.

Depending on your coding style, you may have a lot of lines of code that go past 80, 100, etc. characters, and scrolling to show these longer lines can sometimes be distracting and make it difficult to follow the code.

How far you want to go to fix this is up to you. Just make sure to pull your code up with the lower resolution/larger font size you intend to present with and check that you aren't doing too much horizontal scrolling.