Configuring Eclipse to suit your needs

Well, Eclipse has lots of things you can configure, and below are some things that really make a difference...

Configuring auto-refresh

Eclipse by default does not refresh on file changes automatically, so, if you make changes outside of the workspace, you will not see the changes until you refresh it (F5 on the navigator). However, you can change the default setting and ask Eclipse to refresh automatically.

To set auto-refresh, go to window > preferences > general > workspace and check the refresh using native hooks or polling and refresh on access check-boxes.

NOTE: not doing so may have some specially strange results with .pyc files not being deleted, as PyDev will only acknowledge that the .pyc file exists on a refresh.

Note: This is automatically done in LiClipse

Set workspace to be utf-8

The default encoding is possibly not utf-8 (depending on your OS, it can be cp1252, ascii, etc), so, the suggestion is setting the default encoding to utf-8 in window > preferences > general > workspace > text file encoding (and you may also want to change the new line delimiter to be unix style on Mac and Windows in that same page).

Note: This is automatically done in LiClipse