Bug 221086

Description Ducky Sherwood 2008-03-02 21:04:41 EST

I request a mechanism for sharing perspective configurations.

There are two parts to this request.  

The first is that I just got done with a user study where almost half (at least three of seven) of the users expressed dissatisfaction with the Debugging Perspective as-is.  One re-laid-out his Debugging Perspective immediately; two debugged from inside the Java Perspective.  They complained that they wanted the source view to be tall instead of wide; they complained about disorientation in going from one layout to another.

Now, I am sure that there are some people out there who just love the way it is now, so changing it would be difficult.  However, if there was a way to export and import layouts, then one could easily publish (and perhaps email) different versions of perspectives.

Bonnie Nardi, in her book _A Small Matter of Programming_, in a study of how people used spreadsheets, found that almost everybody *used* macros, but that almost nobody *created* macros.  There were a very small number of people who created macros, and those got shared around.  I imagine that something else could be done with perspectives.