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Up until build 20020115, if you opened a perspective, you would get a nice convenient tool representing that perspective, added to the vertical toolbar on the left. The last 2 integration builds have not had this - you typicaly only have one tool in the vertical toolbar now, which forces you to use the combo box to switch perspectives. There appear to be some "Reuse perspective" type options in the Preferences, which I have turned off, but I still get only one tool (representing the current perspective) in the tool bar. There are a couple of problems with this: - the screen real estate is already taken for the toolbar - just use it, or else it is being wasted. - only having one tool (representing the current perspective) in the toolbar is quite pointless (i.e. switching to the same perspective doesn't help me any). - it takes 2 mouse clicks plus a scroll to use the combo box to switch perspectives, but only one click to switch using the toolbar. - besides being harder to use, the combo is not as intuitive. People have grown used to the "task bar" paradigm that is in Windows and most window managers on Motif. Forcing them to use a combo box to change perspectives is a bit odd. I would like the old behavior back. There should be as many perspective tools in the vertical toolbar as there are items in the perspective combo box.
Along the same lines, SN also noticed that you can no longer have multiple Java perspectives in the vertical toolbar. I'm not sure if this is just a "toolbar is broken" issue (which is addressed in this PR), or if it really is a problem with multiple same-type perspectives. This used to work. The combo box is quite useless for multiple same-type perspectives.
We still have some usability issues with the changes to how perspectives work. This is one of them. We are trying to get away from having multiple pages (which is what the toolbar shows, not perspectives), and just have perspectives work like a different window layout. There are currently too many concepts for the user to have to learn: window (well, they already know this concept), page, and perspective. In 1.0, you could not change the perspective for a page, so they were presented as the same concept in the UI. The problem with multiple pages is that they have separate sets of editors, which contributes to the loss of context problem. We should either remove the page buttons from the shortcut bar and just have fast views there, or add icons to let you quickly switch between the available perspectives (for the single page). If you want multiple Java layouts you will have to have multiple windows. Uncheck reuse perspectives and use Perspective / clone. Actually, you can currently still get multiple pages instead of windows by choosing "In the same window" in prefs, but this option may disappear if we remove support for multiple pages. You still have to use clone rather than Perspective / open though.
*** Bug 8636 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
If you do remove the page-switching tools from the shortcut bar, then yes, please do add perspective-switching tools. Also, please remove the useless-and-ugly perspective-switching combo box from the tool bar. (I already opened a different PR for this - but these PRs now appear to be related, even though they are not identical): http://dev.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=8300 There is no point in having 2 ways to switch perspectives - as you say, it leads to confusion. But the shortcut bar is a *way* better way to switch perspectives than the combo box, for the reasons stated in the other PR. As for pages, now that I know they exist, (before reading your comment, I did not know there were 2 separate "grouping" concepts visible) ...I have a question. Why do pages exist at all? Why complicate life with extra concepts? I think Eclipse should have 2 grouping concepts only: (1) "perspectives that are switchable in the shortcut bar" AND (2) "windows". i.e. page == window. Is the concept of "page" really pulling its weight? Is there some compelling reason to keep them? Is there some UI advantage to exposing them to the poor user? Just delete the concept - it will be very freeing.
Defer until after release 2.0
Reopen to investigate
Please allow multiple java perspectives in the same window to be open on different editors! I probably didn't say this right. What I mean is that I'd like to click one one java perspective and position myself in a java source file, then switch to another java perspective, position myself in another java source file, then switch back to the original java perspective and be at the same place in the java source file for that perspective. Is this easier to understand? If you do this, then I can go back to working in only one window. Yay!!
Yes, you said it right. This was changed after 1.0 because users were losing context too often. After a usability study, it was decided that keeping the same context in all perspectives in a window would be better. And it has proven to be better. So multiple window is the answer for users that needed multiple context. Closing as fixed since the original bug was fixed.
Too bad, I hate this behavior.
