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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T22:56:16+00:00

Is there a way to search for folders/projects by name in the Eclipse workspace?

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Is there a way to search for folders/projects by name in the Eclipse workspace?

The results would best be returned in a view where I can do bulk operations (like closing, opening, assign working set).
It’s just to fiddly to manually click through the list of hundreds of projects.

This seemingly trivial task is causing grief to me, which I find embarrassing after all my Eclipse years.

I have tried:

  1. Search dialogs (Ctrl+H) – among the multitude of options, I don’t find anything that would actually select folders or projects (only files)
    • Open Resources(Ctrl+R), looks handier than the dialogs, but again: only file search. BTW, why isn’t that called “Open File”? resource can normally be a folder too, right?
    • use filtering in the package/project explorer.. But that only supports filtering things out – no way to keep only things matching a pattern
    • can Working Sets be set up in a dynamic way? (given search criteria, rather than fixed assignment in a fiddly dialog). EDIT: this is the winning option, see below.

Did I miss something? Maybe a 3rd party plugin that gives sane searching for anything? Would (Eclipse/GroovyMonkey) scripting help with this? Mylyn?
Is this too much to ask for, from a such mature environment?

I have kindly asked this on Eclipse forums, and they kindly answered “No” 🙂
As usual, I have more confidence in SO folks, and would be grateful for ideas.

And the -current- winner is Scott’s excellent dynamic working sets plugin, which exactly implements the option 4 above!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    First, I’ll answer the “dynamic working set” question:

    I’ve written a dynamic working set plugin. It allows you to group projects by project nature, regular expressions for names, and (as an extension to it) maven group and project name.

    Check it out at http://code.google.com/p/javadude/wiki/DynamicWorkingSets

    That may give you everything you need for now…

    Otherwise, I don’t think there is anything like what you’re looking for, unless someone writes a plugin for it (which would be easy to do, once used to writing eclipse plugins)

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