Please help me use Eclipse effectively

Question

• How to run the last explicitly started Run Configuration? Eclipse always tries to run the file in the current editor which is annoying when this is a class that happens to have a main method or is some non Java file for which Eclipse then tries to set up a ant task instead of just running my program. I know I can click the top most item in the Run Pulldown but I would really prefer to have a keyboard shortcut that does excatly this for me.

• Is it possible to quickly write and run a little script to automate some tedious editing tasks? I know I could write extensions in Java but often I just want to a automate something that I will only need once and that wouldn't be longer than maybe 3 lines of javascript code.

• Can I disbale/enable extensions without having multiple eclipse installs? Some extensions (i.e. Android) eat up a lot of resources and slow everything down a bit when they are installed even for projects where they are not used. Is there a way to lazy initialize such extensions or to load them explicitly or even better associate the loading of extentions to projects? I presume uninstalling them will make me lose all my preferences for them as well?

I'm using Eclipse 3.5 Galileo.

Answer 1

This seems to resolve some of your issues nicely:

http://eclipseone.wordpress.com/

Specifically, this addresses the "run last" problem you described.

About disabling plugins, you should be able to set up multiple Eclipse workspaces with different plug in profiles. To enable/disable plugins, go to Preferences > General > Startup and Shutdown and uncheck any plug in you don't need.

In Windows, you can even create individual Eclipse shortcut icons for each workspace by specifying the workspace location using the -data command line parameter:

eclipse.exe -data <workspace path>