How can I take eclipse out of MDI mode?

Question

Does anyone know of a way to make Eclipse an SDI application rather than an MDI one? SDI - Single document interface, each pane is its own window MDI - Multiple document interface, all of the panes are stuck inside one "master" window.

Eclipse is an MDI application. All of the little panes (like the call stack, variable viewer, etc) are part of the one master Eclipse window. Rather than having all of the windows stuck inside one master "eclipse" window, I'd like them to all be their own free-floating windows.

Berniecebernier

Answer 1

To make a pane "free-floatting" just drag that pane outside the main eclipse window.

If you have only one monitor, you have to resize first your eclipse window: you can not leave eclipse maximized on all the screen space.
Then you have to drag your pane outside the eclipse window until you see the cursor change into a little window with a '+' in the middle.

Once all your panes are in the required position, save your configuration in a new perspective. (Menu Window\Save Perspective As)

That way, you can switch between panes configurations easily.

---

Regarding the SDI aspect however, the editor part of eclipse is made to edit several document (so, MDI only).
Karl's double-click suggestion is the most effective to focus on one of those edited document.

Hafnium

I can't seem to make the pane "free-floating" like you suggested. Eclipse does not seem to allow me to drag a pane outside of the main window. I'm using Eclipse Version 3.2.2 on Ubuntu. – Berniecebernier

Weird... I know Eclipse will not authorize you to drag an EDITOR pane, but a view pane should be no problem. What pane are you trying to drag out of the eclipse main window ? (Note: I remember it working for eclipse3.3. It certainly works with 3.4... 3.2 is a bit too old for me) – Hafnium

Answer 2

Hit the little X next to each document until there is only one open.

Alternatively, doubleclick on the tab to maximize it.

Then edit your question to give some more information about what you really want to do.

Mclemore

Answer 3

No, Unfortuantly Eclipse 3.x and lower do not allow the editor window to be outside the application window. You can drag other windows outside the main window to give you more editor space, but you cannot for example drag an editor outside the main eclipse window onto a second monitor and to have another code window open on the main monitor. This feature seems to be scheduled for Eclipse 4. See https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=8886 for this feature.

Tennessee

Since I was brought here from google when searching for how to get the code editor part onto two monitors, I thought I'd share a link to another thread which explains it. (Basically Window -> New Window) #319440 – Redundancy