Eclipse: Should I create a workspace for each project?

I used to keep separate workspaces, but got tired of the difficulty in keeping settings consistent between them. Now what I do is create working sets for different projects and change the current window working set to filter out everything except what I want to work on. So far this has worked fine for me.

Since each project can have multiple working sets, and the window working set can be any combination of working sets, it's quite easy to only see what you want at any given time this way.

I create Eclipse workspaces around products, because for me, a product can have multiple projects within them, for example like having core libraries compiled into one jar in a project, this is used by other projects.

In terms of production environment, you would want products running in different directory structures, much cleaner that way. And in eclipse the workspace creates a directory with workspace name. So, create workspaces based on product/app rather than one or more projects within them.

Not only do I keep separate workspaces for each project but I keep separate copies of Eclipse also. This is because I typically have to put projects on ice for long periods and return to them (with little notice) and they absolutely must build. I can't take the chance that some plugin I've installed for my latest project (maven based) will interfere with the build process of one of the legacy systems (ant based). For the record I do document the eclipse environment for those legacy systems but I don't have time to mess with eclipse when patching a production bug.

If the projects are interrelated (i.e. have dependencies on each other) then it quite often makes sense to have them in the same workspace. Also, if you are working on several projects to solve a related problem, the same applies.

You will waste a lot of time changing workspaces unnecessarily otherwise, especially when the IDE will immediately show you the impact the changes in one project has on another.