My workspace is simply huge. And while I'm sure some of you have larger ones, mine is about at the limit of what I can handle and still be reasonably productive. Now, I've learned to simplify things a lot over the years by using working sets and separate workspaces for different jobs, but there's only so far you can divide things up this way. At some point, you have to be seeing your entire, 10,000 file project because it just doesn't make sense from an organizational standpoint to split it up. I'm sure we've all at some point had to scroll through that mile long package explorer view looking for that one package we need - or maybe that one class, if you aren't an "Open Type..." aficionado.

Well, the pun is that if you are getting resource blindness while looking at Eclipse, you should use Mylar . To quote from the mylar project page :

Mylar is a task focused UI for Eclipse that makes working with very large workspaces as easy as working with small ones. It makes tasks a first class part of Eclipse, and integrates task repositories such as Bugzilla, Trac, and JIRA. Once your tasks are integrated, Mylar monitors your work activity to identify information relevant to the task-at-hand. Mylar uses this task context to focus the Eclipse UI on the interesting information, hide the uninteresting, and automatically find what's related. This puts the information you need to get work done at your fingertips and improves productivity by reducing searching, scrolling, and navigation. By making task context explicit Mylar also facilitates multitasking, planning, reusing past efforts, and sharing expertise.

The cool bit is what it does to your workflow. I've been playing with it over the weekend, and I've found that just the ticket system integration is incentive enough to use the plugin. I strongly recomend you check out the 1 hour webinar (you can trim it to 30 minutes if you skip the second part about the internals of Mylar). Seriously, Mylar can do some cool stuff and it's worth digging a little further into than most "next big timesaver" plugins.

Oh, Riyad Kalla wrote a neat little article describing Mylar in detail. Yet another source of info.

So take a half hour or so and check out Mylar and let us know what you think! It's become part of my Eclipse configuration.