Pimp my ABAP in Eclipse IDE

You may already noticed that eclipse comes along with a huge set of functions in the menu and in the toolbar. A lot of these functions you will never use. Am I right?

Do you know that there is a possibility in eclipse to customize your IDE and you can delete all the functions from the menu that you don’t use? In eclipse this customizing is part of the concept of perspectives. You already experienced the perspectives when using different toolsets in your IDE or when using the ADT debugger. Every perspective has its own view configuration and its own toolbar and menu item configuration.   

You manage the perspectives via the top-level menu “Window”:

Before you start to customize the perspective I recommend to create a new perspective. You do this via the “Save Perspective As…” menu item. After triggering that function you will get a popup where you can enter the name of the new perspective.

Now you are ready to play around with the customization features.

Choose “Customize Perspective …” menu in the window menu to open the customizing wizard:

With this wizard you are able to change the structure of the Toolbar and the menu bar.

On the first tab of the wizard you can change the Toolbar Visibility. 

That means you can define which command should be visible in the toolbar when this perspective is active.

The toolbar buttons are organized in groups displayed in the wizard as the tree structure. Just unmark the checkboxes for the functions that you don’t need.

On the second tab of the wizard you can change the Menu Visibility. 

The behavior is similar to the toolbar configuration. You just define via the checkboxes which functions you want to have in the menu and which not.

The result of your customizing you will see after pressing OK. The menu and toolbar is immediately adapted accordingly.

More information about the customizing you can also find the standard eclipse help.

Have fun with it.

Regards,

Thomas.