How do I open a Windows Explorer window via Eclipse?
Author: Deron Eriksson
Description: This tutorial describes how to open a Windows Explorer window using an external tool in Eclipse.
Tutorial created using: Windows XP || JDK 1.5.0_09 || Eclipse Web Tools Platform 1.5.1


Page:    1 2 >

Sometimes, I find it useful to be able to jump into the file system in a Windows Explorer window from the current file or directory that I have highlighted in my Navigator view in the Resource perspective.

One way to do this is to use the Easy Explore plug-in, which can be downloaded from http://easystruts.sourceforge.net/. With this plug-in, you can right-click a file or directory in your Navigator view and it will open the location using a Windows Explorer window.

Easy Explore

Another way of accomplishing the same task is to create an External Tool configuration with Windows Explorer as the application to open, with the path to the currently selected file or directory as the program argument. How do we do obtain this absolute path to the selected target? With a variable. So, we can create an External Tool configuration such as the following seen below.

'Open In Explorer Window' External Tool Configuration

The argument (resource_loc) variable is selected from the list of variables, which can be obtained by clicking on the 'Variables...' button.

Selecting a variable

If you'd like to include a folder menu on the left side of your Windows Explorer window, you can change the Arguments value from {resource_loc} to /e,${resource_loc}.

'Open In Explorer Window' External Tool Configuration

(Continued on page 2)

Page:    1 2 >