Depending on your development system OS, you can start the IDE from the system UI or the command line.
When you run the IDE for the first time, you can choose the workspace for storing your projects.
You can switch workspaces at any time by selecting Other... option, which opens the Eclipse Launcher window.
. The submenu shown lists recently used workspaces and theThe workspace directory should never be checked into a revision control system nor located on a shared drive (unless you're certain that there will only ever be one person using it). The frequent and large-scale development cycles in workspace metadata might cause poor performance on network filesystems, particularly with large workspaces.
In the workspace directory, the IDE stores personal usage and project information in the .metadata subdirectory. The .log file in this subdirectory contains an internal error log, which is used to troubleshoot the IDE.
The .metadata/.plugins subdirectory stores your perferences so the IDE configuration is saved between usage sessions. This location also stores sessions generated by the analysis tools used by the IDE.