In the good old times, when I didn't have a clue, that there could be something but Windows, I sometimes wondered what was the best setting for text file encoding in Eclipse. I tried this and tried that but in the end there was no big effect or none at all. How could there have been: I always used Windows.
Since I broadend my mind and started using Mac, which showed me how dark an age those good old times have been, I have come to see, how useful text file encodings can be. Recently I started working on a common project wih Kai and some other Eclipse guys. When I checked out the initial contribution which was created on a Windows machine, I ran into trouble with the German special characters. Well, Kai used UTF-8, which was a very smart choice, but he applied that setting in his workspace. Of course the workspace settings were not in SVN, therefore I couldn't know. And my workspace settings were Mac's default which is not UTF-8.
In my opinion, the best solution for this is to apply the text file encoding settings to every project. OK, that's a little work to do, but I think it pays off. Particularly as there are more common settings that are better applied to projects instead of workspaces, e.g. compiler or formatting settings.
How to do it? Just open the project properties (Alt + Enter), go for the Resource page, set the Text file encoding to Other: and choose some common format.
