Perspective is a collection of editors and views, and how they are laid out or arranged in the main Eclipse window. At different stages of development, you need different views to be displayed. For example, when you are editing the code, you need to see Project Explorer and Task views, but when you are debugging an application, you don't need those views, but instead want to see variable and breakpoint views. So, the editing perspective displays, among other views and editors, Project Explorer and Task views, and the Debug perspective displays views and editors relevant to the debugging activities. You can change the default perspectives to suit your purposes.