Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide: Environmental Settings
- The Concept of Perspectives
- Zend Studio for Eclipse Preferences
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Concept of Perspectives
As was discussed briefly in Chapter 1, "A First Look at Zend Studio for Eclipse," the concept of perspectives is helpful when you are using Zend Studio for Eclipse in different contexts and different stages of development. You should learn how easily you can define and utilize perspectives, and over time this ability should become second nature to you.
To begin with, you should look at the views that you want to have in focus. Then you can save those views and name them as your own perspective. To look at the views available, you can select Window, Show View, Other. A dialog appears, showing a list of all available views within Zend Studio for Eclipse. After you select the views that you want and arrange them on your screen, you can save that collection of views under a perspective name of your own choosing. To do this, select Window, Save Perspective As. Figure 3.1 shows the perspective naming dialog with the existing perspective names already listed.
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Figure 3.1 Saving a newly designed perspective.
The customization of the perspective does not end there. You can manage some of the toolbar icons and menu items that are connected to the perspective. To do this, select Window, Customize Perspective, or right-click on the perspective in question on its toolbar on the top-right side of the IDE and select Customize. Be sure that you name your new perspective uniquely before you change too many of its details just in case you are changing the options of a "stock" perspective that you don't want to change permanently. When the customization window opens, as shown in Figure 3.2, you can change any of the settings made available to you.
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Figure 3.2 Customizing a newly created perspective.
On this customization window, you can control what menu items show up on each of three submenus: namely, the File, New menu; the Window, Open Perspective menu; and the Window, Show View menu. This is controlled through the Submenu drop-down list on the Shortcuts tab of the Customize Perspective window. When this drop-down is changed, the subcategories that are available adjust to the new context.
By switching to the Commands tab within this same customization window, you can then control both the menu item and toolbar item of other areas within Zend Studio for Eclipse (but only for the current perspective that you are customizing). Figure 3.3 shows the options for this tab. For example, if you turn on the HTML Composer Actions selection (as shown in the Figure 3.3), you activate the whole list of menu items under the Modify menu (which appears as a new top-level menu between the Project and Run menus), and you add a series of toolbar items that have their own toolbar at the top of the IDE (see Figure 3.4). Again, this happens only within the current perspective.
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Figure 3.3 Customizing a newly created perspective.
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Figure 3.4 Newly added HTML Composer Actions menu and toolbar items.
As you should be aware by now, the perspective feature of Zend Studio for Eclipse alone is extremely valuable to PHP developers. But, as you would expect from a modern computer programming interface, there is much more control at your fingertips. Enter Zend Studio for Eclipse Preferences.