When you're developing for a microcontroller or IC, it's handy to have the documentation available at your fingertips.
Many manufacturers give strange names to these documents. The Renesas RX65N that I'm currently working with has a datasheet called r01ds0276ej0230-rx651.pdf, the manual for the evaluation board r01uh0761eg0100-rx65n.pdf.
Even if you have a good directory structure, it remains difficult to find them back. You open 3 wrong files before you have the right one.
Eclipse to the rescue.
PDF Plugin
A PDF plugin will add PDF view functionality to the IDE. If you double-click on a PDF file in the project explorer, it opens in a window next to your code.
There are several. I've used PDF4Eclipse in the past. This time, in Renesas' e2 studio, I use Gnostice Free PDFnOffice Viewer Eclipse Plugin.
Install the plugin of your choice. The one that works best for your (or the manufacturers) Eclipse version.
Create Virtual Folders and Links to PDFs
We're just linking to files, not copying them. That means we don't need disk space or directories.
Eclipse has Virtual Folders. These are maps in your project that don't exist on disk.
You create them like any other folder, but use the Advanced -> Virtual Folder option
You can put links to files there, but not real files. That's what we want.
To place a file link in a virtual folder, you can drag-and-drop it from your OS's file explorer, or use Eclipse's Add -> File -> Advanced -> Link.
If the files have abstract names, you can rename them in Eclipse. This will not modify the original filename.
Below is an example of this approach.
In this case, where I wanted to structure all documentation of the microcontroller, I created a dedicated Project for the RX65N doco.
Because this will never have to be compiled, I used an Eclipse "Generic" project:
You can link the same file as many times as you want. If you want to have a DAC IC datasheet inside a project where you use it, you can create a virtual folder "documentation" in that project, then drag and drop the datasheet there.
If you're using it in another project, you can drag and drop it there too. It takes virtually no disk space.
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