Starting the IDE

Depending on your development system OS, you can start the IDE from the system UI or the command line.

Unlike in previous releases, there's no shell script to launch the IDE. The environment is set by the installers, so you don't need to run a script that sets environment variables to point to various SDP installation directories.

To start the IDE:

For Windows, choose QNX > QNX Momentics IDE from the Start menu; you can also click the desktop icon with the same label, which is added when you install QNX SDP
For Linux, run ~/qnx/qnxmomentics/qde; you may have chosen an installation directory other than ~/qnx, but the rest of the filepath will be the same
For MAC OS, click the icon labelled QNX Momentics IDE from the launchpad; this icon is added when you install QNX SDP

Setting the workspace location

When you run the IDE for the first time, you can choose the workspace for storing your projects.

By default, this directory is C:\Users\username\ide-version-workspace (on Windows), $HOME/ide-version-workspace (on Linux), or /Applications/ide-version-workspace (on Mac OS). For Windows, username must not contain spaces.

When you start the IDE, you can tell it to store your workspace in another location, as follows:

When the Eclipse Launcher window appears, enter the new location.
To do so, you can:
- Manually enter a directory path in the Workspace text field. You can create a new workspace by entering a new path.
- Click Browse and navigate to and choose a directory from the file selector.
- Expand the Recent Workspaces dropdown and click a directory in this list.
Note: The workspace path must not contain any spaces or non-standard characters. Although the IDE accepts them, the underlying build tools don't like directory and file names with such characters. For the list of unacceptable characters, see “Creating a QNX project”.

When creating a new workspace, you can copy the Workbench Layout and/or Working Sets settings from the current workspace, by expanding the Copy Settings dropdown and checking the corresponding boxes.
If you always want to access the same workspace location on startup, check the box labeled Use this as the default and do not ask again.
Click Launch to continue loading the IDE.

You can switch workspaces at any time by selecting File > Switch Workspace. The submenu shown lists recently used workspaces and the Other... option, which opens the Eclipse Launcher window.

The 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.

Where workspace files are stored

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.