ide - Can Eclipse refresh resources automatically?

Question

Eclipse (3.4.2 with PyDev) deals with out-of-sync resources (files that have been edited outside of the IDE) differently from other IDEs that I've used, where only resources with editors open are considered out-of-sync. In Eclipse, any resource can go out of sync.

This means that when I perform a search after any file has changed outside of Eclipse, I get an error dialog telling me that files are out of sync, even if they have no open editors. As far as I can tell, there is no global refresh command, so I'm forced to read the project names (I have several projects) in the error dialog, and do a right-click + refresh for each of them.

I've checked the Refresh Automatically setting in Settings > General > Workspace, but this has no effect. Is there any way to get Eclipse to always just load non-active resources from disk?

Answer 1

This issue will be fixed in Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo). While "Refresh Automatically" does eventually bring resources back into sync, the refresh hook only exists for Windows, so on Linux and Mac OS it has to poll the filesystem periodically.

From 3.7 there's a new preference Settings > General > Workspace > Refresh On Access (aka Lightweight Refresh). This preference causes Eclipse to automatically refresh resources when it discovers that they're 'out-of-sync'. When opening, reading or searching files, it'll prevent out-of-sync errors from occurring.

See also: https://bugs.eclipse.org/303517