# General

General settings for the Workbench. The term Workbench refers to the desktop development environment.

Each Workbench window contains one or more perspectives. Perspectives contain views and editors and control what appears in certain menus and tool bars. More than one Workbench window can exist on the desktop at any given time.

The following preferences can be changed on the General preference page.

Option | Description | Default
Always Run in Background | Turn this option on to perform long running operations in the background without blocking you from doing other work. | Off
Keep Next/Previous Part Dialog Open | If this option is turned on then the editor and view cycle dialogs will remain open when their activation key is let go. Normally the dialog closes as soon as the key combination is release. | Off
Show Heap Status | Turn this option on to display an indicator showing information about current Java heap usage. | Off

Initial Maximum Number of Elements Shown in Views

Specifies the limit for incremental view updates. Package Explorer, Project Explorer, Problems View, Java Outline View and JUnit View will limit the number of initially shown children per parent element.
This avoids UI freezes in large viewers, where the limits of the underlying user interface toolkit are hit while trying to render thousands of elements, leading to minute long UI freezes.
Set it to 0 to disabl this feature.

1000

Workbench Save Interval | The field indicates how often the state of the workbench like perspective layouts and open editors is automatically saved to disk. Set it to 0 to disable this feature | 5

Open mode...

You can select one of the following methods for opening resources:

- Double click - Single clicking on a resource will select it and double clicking on it will open it in an editor.
- Single click (Select on hover) - Hovering the mouse cursor over the resource will select it and clicking on it once will open it in an editor.
- Single click (Open when using arrow keys) - Selecting a resource with the arrow keys will open it in an editor.

  Note: Depending on which view has focus, selecting and opening a resource may have different behavior.

Double click

### Related Reference

Workbench Window Layout