What are some neat features of Eclipse you think more people should know about?

General Discussions
#1

I have 3 things I feel like more people should know about in Eclipse:

CTRL+SHIFT+O - Organizes imports for you.
CTRL+SHIFT+F - Formats your code for you.

Plus you can drag panels outside of the Eclipse window! Screenshot.

What are yours?

  • Jev.
#2

Configuring Eclipse so that organizing imports and code formatting happens at each Save, so that you never need those key combos in the first place.

#3

CTRL+SHIFT+I - Fixes the indentation of the selected text.

#4

Awww. That was my big one.
Generally any IDE has this, but if you refactor a class, field, method, variable, etc. name, rather than simply renaming it, the IDE will update all references to that specific class/field/method/variable. In Eclipse, I’m pretty sure it’s ALT + SHIFT + R.

While you are typing CTRL + SPACE will bring up the context menu. Normally it doesn’t pop up until you use the dot operator.

Also, I’m a huge fan of Eclipse’s debugger. From what I can tell, people in general don’t use debuggers a lot, but they are definitely a saving grace.

#5

Some more handy key combos:

+1 on CTRL+SPACE, am always horrified when I see people fully typing class and variable names!

If you want to find a class, CTRL+SHIFT+T brings up the dialog, you can use camel-case to find the class, e.g. type something like VerBF or VBF finds my VertexBufferFactory class.

CTRL+SHIFT+R does a similar thing for resources (config files, XML, properties, etc)

SHIFT+ALT+S brings up the source contextual menu, handy for auto-generating (for example) constructors, getter/setters, etc.

To rename/refactor a variable, class member or class-name, highlight it and do SHIFT+ALT+R.

Go to Preferences > Java > Code Style to fiddle with the re-format and import ordering options when saving (mentioned above). You can also edit the default comments and JavaDoc when creating a new class, method, etc.

Preferences > Java > Editor > Content Assist > Favorites and add packages that commonly have static imports, the CTRL+SPACE contextual menu does not include static imports by default. Handy for stuff like org.junit.Assert and org.mockito.Mockito for unit-tests, and the various OpenGL APIs.

#6

I can’t use the ALT+SHIFT combos because that changes my keyboard layout :frowning:

#7

CTRL+1 moves the cursor to the nearby error and opens the Quick Fix.

#8

You can likely reassign those functions to different keystrokes. I wouldn’t know how, but just mess around the Preferences.

#9

It’s in Preferences -> General -> Keys

#10

Awesome! I had no idea that you could set Eclipse to auto format and organize on save! I was just thinking how great it would be to have that as an option. See, I knew I joined this Forum for a reason! 8)