Who doesn’t know them. The good old JFace dialogs in Eclipse that give you a visual representation of what is really a rather simple XML or properties file. In the case of m2e, it looks like this:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
👁 m2e-default

Unfortunately, this screen is a bit slow to load, and it doesn’t offer much value beyond checking version numbers and some other stuff that you’ll never change again. If you’re deep into using Maven, you’ll put plugins all over the place, and there is no way to visually manage the plugins in this screen. There can’t be, because plugins may contain “schemaless” XML, for which it would be impossible to design a non-XML editor.

So, most Eclipse/Maven/m2e users will immediately jump to the pom.xml representation, i.e. the tab on the far right, to edit the XML sources of their pom.xml files.

Luckily, you can change your workspace settings and make opening the XML tab the default for your pom.xml files:

👁 m2e-change-default2

A setting, which I believe should be the default in new installations of Eclipse, anyway. If you agree with this, show this issue some love: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=465882