Thought I’d share my favourite eclipse tips, since I’ve been living in eclipse recently. I first used eclipse in 2003 on a laptop with a shoddy trackpad, and I think that lead me into a mouse-free habit.<\/p>\n
Navigation around text:
\n1. ctrl-. and ctrl-, to jump to next\/last compile error.
\n2. ctrl-shift-p to bounce between matching parens.
\n3. Expand\/contract selection syntactically – alt+shift+up\/down. Replaces 90% of all careful mouse-drag selecting.
\n4. Move cursor using incremental search (ctrl-j) rather than cursor keys.
\n5. See all uses of a field\/variable quickly – bind “search all occurances in file” to a key (I used alt-shift-f), put cursor on a field, hit your shortcut, then use ctrl-. and ctrl-, to jump between occurances.
\n6. Move lines of code around with alt-{up,down}<\/p>\n
Navigation around projects:
\n1. Switch to recently used editors\/view\/perspective – ctrl-{f6,f7,f8}. I also bind the f6 action to ctrl-tab too.
\n2. Most laptops have a “right-mouse-click” key on the keyboard.
\n3. “alt-shift-q p” to focus on the package explorer, shift-{left,right} to expand\/collapse folders, then f12 to focus back on the editor.
\n4. Use ‘show call hierarchy’ (ctrl-alt-h) and ‘show in type hierarchy’ (f4) lots rather than dumb search.<\/p>\n
Type less stuff:
\n1. Create new variables by just typing “new Foo();” and then “ctrl-2 l” to assign to a local.
\n2. In the outline view, drag methods to reorder them in the file.
\n3. Use templates to surround stuff – saves hunting for the correct location for a closing bracket. Create a template called “validate” with “Validate.notNull(${word_selection})”. Then use it by selecting an expression (using expand-syntactically), hit ctrl-space twice to see templates and pick your new template. Eclipse wraps the existing expression with the template! Or, do a more generic version, such as “${cursor}(${word_selection})” which sets you up to pass the selected expression as an argument to a method call.<\/p>\n
Random: Running stuff: I also have an eclipse extension that I wrote to toggle between a class and its test class. I’m still squishing bugs in it, but I’ll share it if you’re interested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thought I’d share my favourite eclipse tips, since I’ve been living in eclipse recently. I first used eclipse in 2003 on a laptop with a shoddy trackpad, and I think that lead me into a mouse-free habit. Navigation around text: 1. ctrl-. and ctrl-, to jump to next\/last compile error. 2. ctrl-shift-p to bounce between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nobugs.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1. Ctrl-shift-L twice takes you straight to the keybinding pref.
\n2. When changing existing code, try to only ever use refactorings – avoid editing at the raw textual level.
\n3. I also do a lot of speculative refactorings, most of which I immediately undo. For example, if I see a big method, I’ll select some likely looking chunk and try an ‘extract method’. If eclipse tells me it’ll need too many parameters, I’ll cancel and try a bigger\/smaller chunk of code. Or, if one of the parameters looks odd to me, I look to see if I can reorder code, or extract a new local, prior to running extract method. I call the new method ‘foo’ until I decide if it’s a keeper or not.
\n4. Use the quickfixes for the if\/when\/switch keywords (eg. “invert if, convert to continue”)
\n5. Use ctrl-m to toggle maximize your view\/editor.
\n6. Use the eclipse-fullscreen<\/a> extension (ctrl-alt-z) for even more screen space.<\/p>\n
\n1. Go to prefs, search for “launching” and tick “always launch the last-run application”. Then use f11 and ctrl-f11 to run whatever tests\/app you’re working on.<\/p>\n