Sharing Eclipse Preferences Across Multiple Eclipse Installation with Oomph

Introduction

Eclipse is an excellent Java programming IDE tool. There are many pre-configured installation packages that allow us to work on specify project requirements. As time passes by, I end up with many installations of Eclipse of various versions.

Eclipse has the capability to safe disk space by enabling the plugin sharing features. But this is good only if all the Eclipse installations are the same version. Sharing plugins across different versions of Eclipse will cause conflicts as one plugin might work in one version but not in the other.

All my Eclispse installation is standalone because I do not want to share the plugins. But I do want to share some preferences, such as text editor colors. For example, if I change the syntax colors of the Javascript Editor in one of the Eclipse installation, I want the changes to be applied to the other Eclipse installation as well. For this, Oomph is a handy tool.

Capturing the Preferences

First you need to capture the preferences that you want to apply to other installations. Go to Preferences->Oomph->Setup Tasks

Check the checkboxes "Show toolbar contributions" and "Show progress in setup wizard".

The following will be added to the toolbar.

Open User Preferences to capture:

Then click on Capture Preference icon:

Then choose the specific preferences, for example, the colors of JSP tag attribute name, equal and value:

Note that I have other preferences selected earlier to capture.

You can now close the user.setup:

Launch the other Eclipse installation and Perform Setup Tasks:

Choose the preferences and click Finish to sync.

You will see the changes take effect.

If you have the automatic task execution at start time enabled, you don't have to manually perform setup tasks.

When you start Eclipse the Oomph setup task automatic run: