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In the Eclipse menu, the 'Run' menu has as its only option 'External tools' (at least, on a basic project). Selecting this menu option presents antoher 'External tools' option. IMHO it's generally not a good feature to have repetition with menu names. Perhaps it would be better to rename the second menu to 'New tool' or 'Tool Wizard': Run ... External Tools ... New Tool Run ... External Tools ... External Tool Tested on Mac OS X 10.2.2 using Eclipse I20021127
I actually meant to use Tools ... External Tools ... Tool Wizard BTW the 'External Tools' is also a repetition of 'Tools'. Why not have: Tools ... External ... New Tool Tools ... External ... Tool Wizard
Perhaps we should change the "Run -> External Tools ->" menu to only contain launch history. (However then there would be no way to open the launch config dilaog on external tools via the keyboard). Need to consider for 2.1
Deferred for post 2.1 consideration
*** Bug 31183 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Why not have 'Run... Configure' and 'External Tools... Configure' instead of repeating the menu name? That would make more sense, and would also bring consistency to the user interface components.
I appreciate your enthusiasm but generally only committers should reopen bugs that have been set to a resolution of "later". Non-committers can work with votes and severity to indicate the bugs they feel need to be addressed for the next release. Thanks.
I think if this bug is to be reviewed for any stream, it should be introduced in the 3.0 stream, since a major step may involve reorganisation of the UI. Having 'Run... Configure' and 'Debug ... Configure' along with 'External Tools ... Configure' would provide a much more consistent menu approach to dealing with launch configurations.
Attempt to come up with something better for 3.0
In the 3.0M7 stream, there is an 'organise favorites' option. Is this designed to replace the 'Run...' menu at some point? IMNSHO the term 'favorite' doesn't mean much to me as a developer, because it's too generic.
No - organize favorites just organizes your launch history, ordering/defining those configs that you want to appear in the history all the time.
Deferred to post 3.0
Since discussion on this topic is already rather broad... I'd like to see the whole separate ui for extenal tools go away. IMHO an external tool is just another kind of launch configuration which should be managed in the same dialog as the other types of launch configurations. From a UI perspective, the activities of running a JUnit and running an Ant build are not different enough to justify a the duplication of the seperate external tools area. This also seems to make sense in the context of refactoring our ant support to remove the JDT dependency. Launch configurations should be a generic mechanism which may be extended by whomever wants to participate. Users may define external tools, plugin writers may add launch configuration types, etc. JDT just contributes their own launch configuration types.
I completely agree with the comment above -- I've never seen the benefit of having an 'External tool' as distinct from running a program. The only issue is whether the code will run in debug mode; and this could be the same for any program, including launching with external tools. A better UI metaphor may be to have a 'debug' checkbox/toggle that when selected, runs launches in the debug mode (if applicable), and when unselected runs the launch normally.
As of now 'LATER' and 'REMIND' resolutions are no longer supported. Please reopen this bug if it is still valid for you.
