Over the years that I’ve been using Eclipse, my main workspace has been accumulating bit rot. Older versions of plugins have left settings around, many small configuration details have been “not quite right”, and I never really figured out how to deal with the glitches, so I just tolerated them.

But the Europa build, or PDT, or something in my configuration brought in “Buckminster”. In my workspace, Buckminster had an annoying habit of pausing for several seconds, dumping a bunch of error messages about deprecated constructs in some meta data file (to which I say “it’s your damn file, you deal with it” to no avail).

While trying to deal with a major annoyance in Eclipse, namely that settings for tabs/spaces are Workspace global (duh), I gave in to this limitation and set up a new workspace and imported some of my tab based projects.
It’s obvious in hindsight, but the new workspace also lost all of the cruft from the old workspace.

Then I discovered AnyEdit, which does a pretty good job of solving the per-project tabs/spaces issue. (Update site: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/).

So I dropped AnyEdit in and imported all of remaining projects and working sets into the new workspace. Then I renamed the workspaces. Eclipse seemed a little unhappy about the rename the first time through, taking a very long time to do just about anything. But after saving the workspace and restarting worked fine. The import tool even managed to maintain CVS and SVN repository links. Well done!

The only drawback to all of this is the loss of a bunch of fine tuning in the preferences. A large part of those settings were probably suffering from versionitis as well, so that’s probably not a bad thing. Buckminster has stopped complaining, and various other subtle quirks have gone away.