Once a plug-in has contributed extensions to the workbench user interface, it is common for the plug-in to allow the user to control some of the behavior of the plug-in through user preferences.
The platform UI provides support for storing plug-in preferences and showing them to the user on pages in the workbench Preferences dialog. Plug-in preferences are key/value pairs, where the key describes the name of the preference, and the value is one of several different types. (See Runtime preferences for a detailed description of the runtime preferences infrastructure.)
How does a plug-in contribute a page for showing its preferences? We will use the readme tool example to see how it contributes a preference page to the workbench and then look at some of the underlying support for building preference pages.