ColdFusion Builder is built on Eclipse, and Eclipse can be used for many different languages and types of development, each of which likely has different editor needs. To address all of the different requirements of different languages, Eclipse supports a feature called perspectives.
A perspective is a simply a group of layout configuration settings that you can activate as needed. And as you switch between development platforms or languages or stages in development, you simply change perspectives, or have them switched automatically for you.
Just like every other Eclipse plug-in, ColdFusion Builder has a default perspective, a default editor layout for ColdFusion development. And I don’t like it. I find the editor area too small, and I don’t like where views are placed and grouped. But, Eclipse makes tweaking perspectives really easy, and so I’ve been tweaking away for a while. And here’s where I have ended up:
- I like a big coding area, so I don’t like views in panels on both the left and right. So, two panels on the left.
- The top panel on the left contains two views, Navigator and File.
- The bottom panel on the left contains five views, Outline, RDS FileView, RDS Dataview, Services Browser, and Snippets.
- And then I still have the ever useful tab panel beneath the coding area, and it contains Servers, Console, Problems, TailView, Extensions, and Progress.
Much better. At least for me. If you have other ideas or layout tweaks that work for you, please share!
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