Question

I have two monitors and it would be handy to be able to have two eclipse windows, one each running the debugger against a different thread of the same jvm.

Right now I have to keep going to the debug view and clicking on the other thread to switch to it’s context. Having both contexts on the screen at the same time would make things a lot easier.

Is there a way to do this in eclipse?

Answer 1

Is it possible to debug multiple threads in eclipse in different windows?

Well I just tried it and it sort of works. You don’t need multiple monitors to try it.

1. I created 2 threads and put break points in each of their run() methods.
2. I ran the application and the 2 threads show up as paused.
3. I pulled down the Eclipse Window menu to New Window. The new complete Eclipse window should have a debug tab for you to view.
4. I can switch back and forth and step around in each of the threads.

This works but even though there are 2 Debug tabs, they are joined somewhat. When I step forward in the Thread-1 debug window, the focus changes to Thread-1 — even in the other Thread-2 window.

Edit:

Actually I played with it a bit more and it seems to work pretty well. If I switch to the other window debugging Thread-2 and step, it expands the Thread-2 stack trace in the Thread-1 window but doesn’t actually seem to change the highlight. I can go back to the Thread-1 window and step forward easily in Thread-1.

I don’t know of any way to create two separate debug windows that are not fully connected. Web searches come up empty as well.