RSE World

Lately I have been trying out Eclipse Monkey. The Dash project website describes Eclipse Monkey best: "Eclipse Monkey is a dynamic scripting tool for the automation of routine programming tasks. Monkey scripts are little JavaScript programs using either the Eclipse APIs or custom Monkey DOMs." This tool caught my eye as I always wanted to try out Greasemonkey for Firefox and it looked like it could do the same for Eclipse. Reading the wiki for creating scripts showed that it was very easy to do. Now I just needed an idea for a script.

Nick Boldt had an enhancement request to be able to have 2 Remote Systems Views open at once. Until this is added we came up with a workaround to use the Remote Scratchpad. You might be thinking Remote Scratchpad? It is one of the views that comes with RSE, but is hidden behind the Properties view. Its purpose is to be able to drag and drop any RSE object into it for later use. It's great for doing copy and paste across connections. So, if I can drag and drop any RSE object into it I can populate the view to be a secondary Remote Systems View.

With this bug in mind I decided to make a script that would copy all of my connections to the Scratchpad and display the Scratchpad view. The script can be found on bug #210574. If you want to try this out install Eclipse Monkey from the Europa update site and copy the contents of the file attached on bugzilla. Go to Scripts > Paste inside Eclipse. You have now installed your first RSE Eclipse Monkey script that will Clone the Remote Systems View inside the Remote Scratchpad.