# 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
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 to 0 to disable. | 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

Here is what the General preferences page looks like:

### Related reference

Workbench Window Layout