In this video tutorial, we will explore the Eclipse User Interface. This will include windows, menus, views and perspectives.

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Video Transcript
Time – 00:00
Hi. This is Chad (shod) with luve2code.com. In this video we will explore the user interface in Eclipse. We will examine windows, menus, videos and perspectives. Let’s get started.

Time -00:12
When you launch the Eclipse application you’ll see a screen that is similar to this. This is the general layout of Eclipse when you use it for job or development. The window has three main sections. On the left hand side is the package explorer. In the center is the main window. At the bottom are additional views for console output, problems and other items.

Time – 00:31
Moving back the package explorer view you can use this to keep track of multiple projects. You can open the projects by simply expanding the folders. Here I have a samples project. I’ll expand the source directory. There is a package called samples. Then, here we have two java files, Driver.java and Passwordutils. You can expand each one of those and you’ll see a list of methods and fields for those classes. Here I’ll take a look at the generate password method. I can double click it and I’ll see the source code in the main editor window.

Time – 01:01
Now that we have the method open we can view the code, scroll through and click ion all the other code. If you need to get a larger view of your screen you can simply double click the tab at the top. This will maximize the window, just to give you more real state to play around with your code. Then to go back to the regular view you just double click one more time and it’ll pull it up.

Time – 01:20
The Eclipse editor also has another feature that’s very useful. You can hover over method and I like to bring up the job or doc for that method, so that’s the documentation. Here we’ll see the documentation for the append method. Also, at the bottom there is a tab called Javadoc. When you select one of the methods you’ll see it right here instead of having to wait for the popup or worry about the popup moving away, so a very useful feature.

Time – 01:41
If you have any problems with your code, say, for example, I have a typo on the method name and it’ll bring up a red X and also red squiggly to show you there is an error, so you can hover over it and it’ll give it error right there on your screen. Also, you can move to this Problems tab at the bottom, and it’ll give you a list of all the errors so you can work through them accordingly. On this example I’ll just go and fix the error message and I’m ready to go, and the error message goes away at the bottom.
When you run your application, at the bottom of the screen you’ll see the console output. I’ll simply run the app by saying Run as Java application. At the bottom there is a new tab that is showed up, console output. That’s the output in your application. You can double click it to get a much larger view of it, double click again to go back to the original view. When you’re done or you want to clear out this window you simply hit the X and that’ll clear it out. When you run the application one more time you’ll see the same output out there at the bottom with the results of your program.

Time – 02:38
If you accidentally happen to close your console window by mistake, by maybe hitting the X on it, then you can always get back to that console view by going to Window, Show View, Console. That’ll give you the console window back at the original location.

Time – 02:55
Now what I’ll do is I’ll show you the outline view. The outline view is an alternative way of looking at a job or class to get a list of the fields and the methods. You can view the outline view by going to Window, Show View, and Outline. Also bring up the outline view, so it’s over on the right hand side. It has the class, list of fields and the list of methods.

Time – 03:17
One really cool thing about Eclipse is that you can customize the layout of your different views. Instead of having the outline view over in the far right hand side, it would be nice if it’s over on the left side of the window. I can simply grab the tab title and move it one over to the left hand side. Now I have the outline view at the top and the package explorer at the bottom. I’d like for these to show up side-by-side. I can grab this tab and just drag it right next to package explorer, and there you have it. You can go back and forth between them. Say, for example, I’d like to take outline and move it to the bottom, just drag and drop over here to the bottom. That will have the outline view.

Time – 03:55
If you get in a certain weird state like, say for example, I grab this and just move it to the middle and things are not the way I would like you can always reset it back to its original. Eclipse has its idea of a perspective. A perspective is like the default layout for a given scenario. Here we’re using the java perspective. I can simply tell Eclipse to reset the java perspective. I can do that by going to Window, and saying Reset Perspective. This will prompt me if I want to reset. I’ll say yes, and I’m going to back in the original layout.

Time – 04:27
That’s about it. I covered the most common user interface features in Eclipse. Feel free to explore the user interface on your own. Remember you can’t break anything. If you get things out of way just reset the perspective.

Time – 04:41
Let’s go ahead and wrap. On this section we explored the Eclipse user interface. We covered windows, menus, views and perspective. Please subscribe to our channel to view more videos in Eclipse and java. Also, visit our website luve2code.com to download Java source code.