New favorites in Eclipse

I've been digging through the options of Eclipse 3.0 and have found a lot of features I want to try and use. Some of these feature aren't new to 3.0, but I just hadn't noticed them before.



1. Source/Sort Members: This is an old feature I hadn't found before. It does what it says, it sorts all the attributes and methods of a class or interface. You can choose the basic sort order under Preferences/Appearance/Members Sort Order. New to 3.0 is the ability to order members of the same type by visibilty as well.



2. Source/Generate Delegate Methods: Another old feature. Point at a field in a class and it generates methods that delegate to the fields methods. A great typing saver.



3. Preferences/Java/Editor/Enable advanced highlighting/Method declarations: This is new to 3.0 and it allows you to set a special color and text attributes for just the declaration of a method. I generally don't like to use bold text in code and I always disable the default bolding of keywords, but here's a place I think bolding works well. It turns the method declaration into a subtle header.




public void begin() {
_counter = 0;
registerThread();
_strategy.begin();
}



4. Preferences/Java/Type Filters: This option allows you to specify classes or packages you want features like code assist or organize imports to ignore. The one great use I've found for this is to eliminate java.awt.List from the list of possible import options for the type List. I use lists a lot and more than once when performing an 'organize imports' operation I've selected java.awt.List when I wanted java.util.List.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Shark Crackers

Running roughshod or ripshod

Axis, Axes, Axii?