Eclipse is a development environment for creating, organizing, and debugging your programs.
Eclipse organizes your work into projects in workspaces.
Workspaces
When it first launches, Eclipse appears as an Xwindow on your desktop with opportunities to get
an overview, run tutorials, or go to a workbench. A workbench has menus, multiple panes,
toolbars, and tabs. A user cannot run more than one copy of Eclipse at a time, but it is
possible to have multiple workbench windows open. By default it organizes your work
in a workspace ~/workspace, but you can define other workspace locations. Each
workspace can have as many projects as you like. You can see the workspace
structure in the Navigator tab of the left-hand pane of a workbench.
Projects
There need not be a separate project for each different library or executable you intend to build.
When you create a project, you designate a folder where the source files exist. You can either
work with a makefile or set of makefiles that you already have using a "Standard Make Project", or create
a "Managed Make Project". In the latter case, Eclipse will parse the source and header files in your
project directory and create makefiles for you automatically. If there are subdirectories, it will
also parse the files in those and create makefiles in them as necessary.
Perspectives
Several different organizations of windows and menus in the workbench have been predefined. They
are called Perspectives. If you want to build a debug version of your code and do debugging
on it you would use the Debug Perspective. The C/C++ Perspective is used for building Release
(optimized) versions of projects. There are other perspectives that enable one to build from a CVS
repository or in a team environment.
GUI for browsing and editing
When you double-click on a file in the Navigation view, it is opened in an editor pane to the right.
Eclipse can be configured to use different editors for different filetypes.
GUI for compiling and linking
Under the covers, Eclipse uses the same compilers that you access from the command line. It provides
a GUI for choosing between the Intel and Gnu compilers and for choosing among the great variety of options
that are available. When it builds an object for you, Eclipse invokes the command-line compiler
with the appropriate (often lengthy) option string.
