"TheEndless" wrote:
Not intending to hijack, but feel free to direct me elsewhere if I am...
I really want a unified development/build environment across machines, and this Eclipse plugin seems like exactly what can provide that (one's a PC, the other's a Mac), but every time I try to use it, I run into some new little annoyance that my OCD refuses to allow me to workaround.
I concur with the others who've recommended some sort of SCM (I use SVN and GIT). And furthermore if you would like to work with a single instance of the checked out software in multiple workspaces, Eclipse supports that also. For example, If you want to run the same code with different target environments or workspace settings, or if you want each workspace to have a different subset of your codebase, it will be much less confusing if you keep all your code in one place, and have each workspace point to the projects desired for that workspace.
To do this, check out the code from your SCM server into some location, presumably on your share drive. Then open Eclipse and create an empty workspace somewhere. From the file menu, select Import->Existing Projects into the workspace (under the General category). Uncheck the "Copy project into workspace" button, assuming you don't want to have two copies of your files. Now the projects themselves will be on the share drive, but your workspace will exist where you created it. You'll just have a .metadata folde there, which eclipse uses to lock your workspace, keep track of what you're doing, and maintain workspace preferences. Any changes you make to your projects will occur on the server, since that's where the files are. Whenever you switch workspaces, you must refresh all resources, to make Eclipse aware of changes you made from the other workspace.
If you don't want to implement an SCM solution, you can still do what I describe above. You just won't have the benefits of SCM (conflict resolution when two people make changes to the same file contents, history of every change you make, etc.). You do get a rudimentary SCM free with Eclipse, called Local History. It doesn't do conflict resolution, but it keeps track of every version of every file you change. You can specify options for it in Preferences->General->Workspace, and you access it from the right-click menu for any file resource (i.e. Replace with..., Compare with...).