| [platform-ui-dev] Need a better workflow for opening/importing folders |
|
Hi all, This is a following of this blog http://eclipseblog.ostroukhovs.com/2013/11/14/source-editor-worth-70/ , and of https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=37478 . Let's face it: it's very difficult for someone to import a directory as a "simple" project, whereas it is a common use-case. Eclipse is good at importing existing projects (which have a .project file), and there are some wizards that help to import "other kind" of projects (example m2e for pom.xml). This approach of having other wizards is difficult for some users because it implies that user needs to already know which kind of project he's facing before choosing a wizard. It is not always an easy task. Also it appears that when one has a project and has neither Eclipse .project nor other supported project descriptor, it is not trivial at all to go into the "File > New > General > Project" wizard. Most other tool, which are better on this topic, allow to "Open a folder as project" or to "Import a folder as project", and Eclipse shows nothing like this, so some users get lost. This general usability issue has consequence on usage of EGit with m2e for example: EGit shows the "New Project" wizard instead of the "Import Project" wizard probably because the "Import Project" doesn't allow to import arbitrary folders. So I suggest the following changes to ease the adoption and improve the usability of Eclipse: * Create an "Import folder as project into workspace" wizard * Add this entry to the Import wizards * Add this entry to the "Open File..." Handler: if output of "Open File..." is a file, then it opens the file, if it's a folder, then show up the wizard to import it as a project. * (More intrusive) add to the import wizard the ability to detect whether they're relevant or not for a given folder (for example if a .project Eclipse, open the "Import existing project" wizard; if a pom.xml exist, open the m2e wizard; if a Grunt or Bower file exists, open the JS project wizard...). With this, we could think of the general usage being just to "Import a folder as project" and then Eclipse would detect the project kind and open the relevant import wizard. What do you think about this? Do you know some bugs already open on this topic or should I create some? |