Creating your first java project.

The first step is to open a Vim window and create the project by executing:

        :ProjectCreate /path/to/my_project -n java
      

The path supplied will be the path to the root of your project. This path may or may not exist. If it does not exist it will be created for you. If the path does exist, it will be examined for any source directories or libraries (jar files) that should be included in the project's classpath. In either case the end result will be the creation of a .project and .classpath file in the supplied directory. At this time, the .project file is nothing that you need to worry about maintaining as it is purely for Eclipse. The .classpath file on the other hand, is used to manage your project's dependencies, including dependencies on other projects, other libraries, and the location of your source directories. For more on maintaining this file see the classpath docs.

Once you've created your project you can use the :ProjectList command to list the available projects and you should see your newly created one in the list.

        my_project - open   - /path/to/my_project
      

The :ProjectList result is in the form of projectName - (open|closed) - /project/root/path. When you create projects, the last path element will be used for the project name. If that element contains any spaces, these will be converted to underscores.

After creating a project, the next thing you'll probably want to do is edit your project's settings. To do this you can use the :ProjectSettings command. If your current Vim window's working directory is at or under the project's root directory then you can execute the :ProjectSettings with no arguments, otherwise you will need to supply the project name.

        :ProjectSettings projectName
      

After your first time editing your project's settings, a .settings directory will be created in the project's root directory. In there are the project's preferences files. You should avoid editing these files directly and stick to using :ProjectSettings to update them.

In the first section, we mentioned that when a project is created a .classpath file is also created at the root directory of the project. If you did not create a project from an existing project directory (one containing source files, etc.), then your next step will be to tell Eclipse where you plan to store your source files.

For the purpose of this example we will assume that you will store your source files at:

        /path/to/my_project/src/java
      

So, given that location, you will need to open the file /path/to/my_project/.classpath in Vim.

        vim /path/to/my_project/.classpath
      

To add the source directory simply execute the following

        :NewSrcEntry src/java
      

This will add the necessary entry to the end of your .classpath file. The contents of this file should now look something like this:

        
          <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
          <classpath>
            <classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER"/>
            <classpathentry kind="output" path="bin"/>
            <classpathentry kind="src" path="src/java"/>
          </classpath>
        
      

Now that your source directory is setup, you can proceed to edit java files in that directory and make use of the java functionality provided by eclim.