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I started using IntelliJ in 2008 (so it was at version 8 I guess) and I liked it so much more back then. So many awesome features presented in ways that make sense.

With Eclipse, I was stuck by the following weird design decision: All your personal preferences such as keybindings were not saved globally but as part of your current project. What were they thinking? Who would want different keybindings for different projects, think of the muscle memory! Maybe there is a use case for having some specific keybinding for a particular project, so they could have made a way to override your global settings in such case... but not make the very first thing you do, customize it to your liking, a very weird thing different from how every other program works.




Eclipse Keybindings are stored per workspace. A workspace can be used to develop multiple projects.


You're right, I remember it now. I used the wrong terminology in that case. Honestly, the end result is the same. I'm sure there were reasons to use multiple workspaces for different pieces of code and the same user of the same program would still want it to look and feel the same rather than getting thrown the defaults back in your face when starting a new workspace...


You can easily import your preferences into your new workspace.

I mean, it's not even difficult to find, File>Export and File>Import.


But that's exactly the problem! The minute you want to change a key binding or a hotkey, you have a re-export that change to all your workspaces.

Honestly it reminds me of GIMP taking years to finally implement an MDI interface. If only eclipse let me keep the same bindings, UI, etc across different workspaces I probably wouldn't have switched.


But why are they separated by workspaces in the first place?


I use different workspaces for different projects because of differences between code formatting. One project uses 3 spaces and the other uses four spaces. One has curly braces on the same line and the other on their own line.


You can also easily check it into subversion as part of your repo, which probably many people painfully remember.




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