Default workspace settings for customized Eclipse distribution

Question

I'm creating a customized Eclipse distribution, using the Eclipse "Product Configuration Editor". This works great so far - the features/plugins are exported into the target distribution.

What I want now is a default set of settings, that will be made available to the user of the customized distribution by default (for example the workspace encoding should be set to UTF-8 instead of the default system encoding, the tab width should be set to 2 instead of eclipse's default 4, and so on).

I haven't found a way so far to configure the default settings for a new workspace created by the user of the customized distribution, so my question is: Is there a way to do this or do I have to live with the default Eclipse settings?

Answer 1

Take a look at http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/product_configproduct.htm especially the section "Preferences defaults"

After you have defined your product-customization via

<property
        name="preferenceCustomization"
        value="plugin_customization.ini"/>

you have to create your ini file, e.g.

org.eclipse.ui/SHOW_TRADITIONAL_STYLE_TABS=false
org.eclipse.ui.workbench/SHOW_BUILDID_ON_STARTUP=false
org.eclipse.ui/SHOW_PROGRESS_ON_STARTUP=true

the first part before the slash is the bundle id the second part is the preference key. To find out which bundle holds which preference key for the desired preferences (e.g. encoding of the workspace), please navigate to the Preference-Page and use plugin-spy to dive into the code to see which key is used for a certain preference.

HTH Tom