Eclipse Windows

The following briefly describes the various windows in Eclipse so you can get familiar and get the most of it. Your windows may not look exactly like this since they are all moveable, re-sizeable and can be minimized.

Top right heading bar

At the very top right of the screen you will see the COBOL perspective. Perspectives show different views and functionality available to us.  You may have other "perspectives" visible also. There are several perspectives which can be chosen as shown.

  The most common ones we will be using are COBOL and Debug. We will see these in use later.

Top left window

Top left is the COBOL Explorer window which has 2 tabs – one is the COBOL Explorer tab which gives a logical view of your COBOL application. The other is the Navigator which gives a direct view of what is on disk. Most of our time will be spent with the COBOL Explorer view. This Navigator window is a carry-over from the Java version of Eclipse. You will probably not use it for COBOL right now.

If you expand the COBOL Programs entry, you will see the programs used in this Project.

Double click the file ZBNKPRT1.cbl and the source will appear in the top right.

Top right window

Top right is the main activity window (now containing ZBNKPRT1.cbl) where we will be editing source and executing the debugger.

Bottom left window

Bottom left is an Outline and Program Outline tabbed window. This will provide us with outline information of various types when we start to edit our COBOL programs.

Bottom right window

Bottom right are a series of tabbed windows which show the results of compiling and other tasks and also has the Server Explorer window where we can see the underlying execution environment. Again these windows are configurable, so the various tags may well be in the top left window.

At the top right you will see two perspective buttons (in your case there may only be the COBOL one right now).

You can add the Debug button, if it is not there, by clicking the button. You should be in the COBOL perspective at present, but when you start debugging the debug perspective is needed.

Re-arrange windows

Experiment with resizing these various windows and minimizing and restoring.

If you lose a window by closing it, you can get it back from the Window menu at the top of the screen.

Top heading bar

Apart from the menu system, there are a number of buttons at the top, which vary depending on what you are currently doing with Eclipse.

Next: See how to change The Eclipse coloring settings and other properties