My Top 10 Favorite Eclipse Shortcuts

When I first started programming I didn’t realize how important role a good IDE plays. Initially, I just used notepad for a while. :) Although, I did write only few lines long scripts. After a while I switched to “professional” IDE, but I never tried to explore all of the options it was offering. I was perfectly happy with code completion and code coloring. Oh, and I used a shortcut for commenting a line :) And I was satisfied until I saw a colleague using all sorts of shortcuts. One of them was to generate getters and setters for class properties, which was the task I really hated, but always had to write all by myself. Well, enough of small talk, lets take a look at my top 10 choices …

Shortcuts:

  • 1. Code Completion – Ctrl + Space

    Well, since the very beginning and up to now, this is indubitably my favorite shortcut and probably the most used by developers all over the world.

  • 2. Quickly Move Trough Text and Quickly Select Text – Ctrl + Arrow Left/Right and Ctrl + Shift + Arrow Left/Right

    Not exactly Eclipse shortcut, I don’t even know what its official name is, but I use it all the time to quickly move through words.

  • 3. Delete Line – Ctrl + d

    Deletes whole line or selected lines. Comes in very handy :)

  • 4. Quick Fix – Ctrl + 1

    This combination offers tips to fix the compilation error. Very useful so you don’t have to move mouse cursor to that small sign at the beginning of the line.

  • 5. Open Type – Ctrl + T and Open Resource Ctrl + R

    Supports wildcards for searching through files.

  • 6. Generate Source Code – Shift + Alt + S

    This shortcut opens a menu, which provides us with various different possible pieces of code Eclipse can generate for us. Some of the combinations are:

    • Create constructor using fields – Shift + Alt + S O
    • Create constructors from superclass – Shift + Alt + S C
    • Generate getters and setters – Shift + Alt + S R
    • Override/implement methods – Shift + Alt + S C
  • 7. Move To Next/Previus Error – Ctrl + . and Ctrl + ,

    – This way one can quickly jump from one error/warning to another. The only problem with this shortcut is, that you can’t configure it in a way, that it would skip warnings. Or at least I wasn’t able to :)

  • Jump To Point Of Last Edit – Ctrl + Q

    – Jump to position in a file (even if you are in different tab), where you edited it the last time.

  • Show Outline of Class – Ctrl + O

    – Offers a great way to quickly search for a method in a class or check out its methods.

  • Show All Shortcuts – Ctrl + Shift + L

    – This one comes in handy :) With this shortcut you can quickly find a combination you can’t remember at the moment ;) .

Well, these are my favorites, but I use others as well. I would definitely put shortcuts like format file, indent all lines, organize imports etc , but I configured Eclipse to do these things on file save. That way is even faster and more effortless than using shortcuts :) . I hope I inspired someone to let the tool take care of tedious tasks like generating getters and setters and use extra time to be more productive …

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