By default Eclipse keeps a local history of the files you work on. From within Eclipse, right click on a file and select Team->Show Local History.

From here you will get a list of revisions, generally one is made each time you save the file. You can open a revision, or even use a built in diff tool to compare it to your current version.

But in this case we had no current version to even right click on to start the process. So we simply created a new, empty file in the same location as the old one. Then we were able to right click on it and pull up the history.

This local history is stored under your workspace in workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources\.history, but its not easy to manually browse. There any many directories and the files in those directories are given nonsense file names. Much easier to stick with the Eclipse interface.

Keep in mind that if you haven’t edited the file in a while there may not be any history to go to.

But it feels like I’ve been fighting it the whole time. It feels like a buggy, unpolished product not ready for use by everyday programmers who just need to get their work done. I’ve been doing a lot of work via FTP the last few months, on a client’s server. The FTP support is just horrible. When your connection times out, and you click on another directory, the connection is automatically reestablished and the directory contents listed out. Wonderful! But if you are timed out and you try to save the file you’ve been working on, you get two error dialogs, and the file is marked as saved. But its not. So you have to click on another directory to reestablish the connection, then make a change to the file so Eclipse thinks it needs to be saved, then you can save it.

I still haven’t found a way to create a new file, or rename a file through FTP. There are no timestamps listed with FTP files. I’ve also tried the Aptana plugin, which has an FTP client. It showed that it would successfully save files without errors, but after spending awhile trying to figure out why my modified code wasn’t executing, I discovered that it wasn’t really saving my files. Homesite works just fine, so I don’t think the problem lies with the server.

I’ve been clicking through these errors 50 times every day, switching directories unnecessarily just to get my files saved. And at home, with my PHP development – half of the time when I switch between my open PHP files, I get prompted to open the file! If I click ok the file opens in Homesite or Notepad or whatever I have associated with the .php extension. Associating .php with Eclipse does not solve the problem.

When I hit F1 on a ColdFusion tag in CFEclipse, there’s no instant syntax help like in HomeSite. Instead, a browser window slowly loads in the bottom of my editor, after a few seconds a cfQuickDocs page shows up. Now cfQuickDocs is quick, after you’ve loaded the page for the first time. But every time I hit F1 for syntax help I’m loading the page for the first time, because I don’t have the screen real estate to keep that help window open all the time (who does?). At the same time I always get an Eclipse help window popping up on the right hand side, giving me help about the Workbench, Perspectives, etc. Every time!

I’ve been doing a lot of Fusebox development lately. I downloaded the Fusebox plugin for Eclipse, and put it into my plugins folder. I restarted Eclipse. Nothing happened. All my XML files are still all black – no syntax highlighting. I don’t really know what else the plugin was supposed to do. I think it was for Fusebox 3 anyway – not very helpful, even if it did work. There’s more, but I’ll stop there.

So I’m done. I really wanted to use Eclipse. Maybe I’ll give it another try next year.