I've programmed in Emacs for a while, and I'm starting to learn Java in Eclipse. I prefer not to have to take my hands off the keyboard in order to see errors that Eclipse marks in the code... so I'd rather not hover over them, (plus the red X on the left margin is annoyingly small and hard to target for a hover)... is there a way to get them to pop up simply by moving the cursor to that point?
The "Show Tooltip Description" command usually has the keybinding of F2. You can change it on the Keys preference page if you like.
Related
How can I enable clicking on this bubble (or perhaps the name) to instantly jump to the underlined place in code? By pressing f2 and clicking on a small box, the same effect can be achieved, but I remember being able to work far faster doing this on one of my old projects.
Hold Ctrl and hover over the method name. You can then choose to jump to the declaration or super implementation.
To scroll within the Eclipse editor without moving the cursor up and down one can use CTRL+Down or CTRL+Up. But what about left and right?
It is not possible. If you search keys in Eclipse's Preferences, you will find out that you only have Scroll up and Scroll down that you can set hotkeys on.
My recommendation would be changing the maximum line length in the editor.
Make your code shorter. After all, looooong lines of code are not so readable.
Also, resize your editor area. If you feel strangled, remove the Outline, TaskList, and Build view from your right side of Eclipse, and enlarge the editor.
When debugging (Juno, SR1 on mac) I prefer using the keyboard keys instead of the mouse to step, step into, step out, go, etc. But these keyboard shortcuts only seem to work when the editor is in focus. The real problem happens when stepping in or out to another file. The editor correctly shows the current line in the new file, but that file is not focused. Consequently, I must grab the mouse and click in that view to re-enable the hotkeys.
This drags my debugging down to a crawl, as I'm constantly having to use the mouse instead of touch-typing. Searches don't find quite this issue. Anyone with work-arounds?
It depends on the Eclipse version. Eclipse 4.2 sucks on Windows and Ubuntu - Due to a bug
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=372941.
Maybe you can change the key bindings:
Go to Window->Preferences - General->Keys, search for "step into", etc. And change in the select box: "When:" to "In Windows" (from "Debugging") or experiment with it to get result you want.
Setting it to "In Windows" I could "Step into" from any focused Eclipse component e.g. Package Manager, Console, Breakpoints, Servers, etc. And even when stepping into file.
I find Eclipse's (Eclipse 3.7, Indigo, running under Mac OS X 10.6.8) Find/Replace floating dialog box to be very annoying. Part of the time it ends up obscuring the search results. Is there any way to have Eclipse move the Find/Replace somewhere else? I'd like it to be a pop-up view, as I often do with the Console, Servers, Outline, and other views. However, if it could be incorporated into the view which it's searching, that would be great, too.
Eclipse's Find / Replace dialog is a dialog, not a view, so you can't drag and drop it to one of the view areas.
Here's a Eclipse search plugin that might work for you. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to get the Software Update link.
Worst case, you could write your own Eclipse plug-in that creates a view that does a Find / Replace.
TL;DR
Find/replace cannot be used as a view. Here are two ways to find text without obstructing the search:
Use incremental search (CTRL+J)
Use the quick search plugin (CTRL+SHIFT+L)
Pros and cons
Both approaches behave differently from the traditional find/replace and may require some getting used to.
Approach 1.
It works out of the box, no need to install a plugin, but it (currently) does not support pasting nor searching for the current selection (but there is CTRL+K for the latter). You can use UP and DOWN or repeat CTRL+J or CTRL+SHIFT+J to jump between matches.
Approach 2.
This still opens a dialog, but one which integrates the search results rather than obscuring them. I suggest resizing it to have a good preview size.
The default shortcut shadows the "Show Key Assist" original, but this can be changed. It is an extra install and AFAIK only supports case sensitive searches, but it supports searching for the selection and pasting.
It shows matches across files, starting with the top open editor (if you have more than one visible, e.g. side by side, it sometimes does not start with the one you were last on). You can move between matches with UP and DOWN and hit enter to go back to the editor on the selected match.
NOTE
I suppose on OSX you can replace CTRL with CMD in keyboard shortcuts above to achieve the same, but I could not test it. The shortcuts can be customized in Preferences->General->Keys
I often use the Eclipse feature (Galileo) of suggested error corrections to automatically create code stubs or to refactor things. For example, I would write a method that calls other methods which don't exist yet, then move the mouse over the error message and click on "create method". Or, change this to the class name and choose "add static modifier" from the quick fixes.
I think this is very convenient because it lets me stay in one place in my code and sort of "remotely" wire up what's not currently visible on my screen. What I think is annoying though, is that I have to leave the keyboard, hover my mouse over the error symbol, wait for the tooltip to pop up, and click on the option (doing that, I sometimes move the mouse a little over the edge and the tooltip goes away again - very annoying).
Am I missing a faster method here? I can't seem to find a keyboard shortcut, but then I have overlooked stuff from the huge preference dialog before.
Ctrl+1 : Quick Fix.
(Cmd+1 on Mac)
Just put your cursor on the part you suspect you can perform an action (correction, refactoring, ...) and hit the Quick Fix shortcut. The same popup will be displayed, and you can select the right option with the up and down keys.
That, combined with Ctrl+3 (Quick Access) gives you most of eclipse features at your fingertips ;)
See also:
Eclipse Tip: Shortcut to Quick Fix
My Favorite Eclipse Shortcut: Quick Fix
Eclipse hotkeys: eclipse shortcuts gold mine.
As an additional tip, a specific type of quick fix I use all the time has a dedicated shortcut:
Alt+Shift+J: Add Javadoc comment stub for current method.
After using ctrl+1 like mentioned in the top answer, press ctrl + enter to apply the selected fix all to problems of the same category.
In general, keyboard shortcuts in IDEs (and code tools in general) are coming from a user principle that holds that the more your hands/fingers can remain poised over the keyboard (as in the f-j centered "touch typist" position), the more productive you can become. This is probably why the use of the number keypad is not encouraged, or other keys, less common to the most basic layout keyboard, are not used. Many hold that useful keyboard shortcuts should be easily reachable from this position.
One thing I will say about eclipse keyboard shortcuts is that if you use a popular Windows presentation utility called Zoom-it, you need to turn that off when using eclipse. There are several show-stopper conflicts between the two, such as Ctrl-1 and Ctrl-3.