Checking a project out
To ensure that you have up-to-date project files, right-click the project and choose Team > Get Latest Revision, then right-click the project and choose Team > Check Out.
You can also open files or an entire project by dragging from the Navigator
to a changelist A list of files, their version numbers, the changes made to the files, and a description of the changes made. A changelist is the basic unit of versioned work in Helix Server. The changes specified in the changelist are not stored in the depot until the changelist is submitted to the depot. See also atomic change transaction and changelist number. in the Perforce perspective's P4 Pending Changelists view.
To verify that the project files are checked out, look at the project in the Package Explorer view. The files are displayed as shown in the following figure, note the red checkmark decorators.
To retrieve a project that is stored in the Perforce depot but not on your machine, you must import it. To configure Eclipse to automatically open a file for edit when you change it (that is, when you start typing in the file or paste something into it), enable the Enable support for Workbench edit, delete, rename and refactoring operations preference. See Setting Preferences for details.