teaching machines

Eclipse Shortcuts

October 2, 2017 by Chris Johnson. Filed under eclipse, public.

Eclipse has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and I know hardly any of them. But my students still think I’m an ace. These are the ones I do use on a regular basis, shared so that my students can be aces:

• Automatically add import statements to classes that live in faraway packages with Control-Shift-O or Command-Shift-O. That’s the letter O, not the number 0.
• Automatically reformat your code with Control-Shift-F or Command-Shift-F. You don’t need to have the code highlighted for this to work. However, this will only work when there are no egregious syntax errors.
• If you do have have egregious errors and still want to clean up your code’s indentation, first select your code with Control-A or Command-A. Then hit Control-Shift-I or Command-Shift-I.
• Comment or uncomment the line of code in which the cursor resides with Control-/ or Command-/. To apply this to multiple lines, select them first.
• Maximize (or unmaximize) the current editor with Control-M.
• For some reason, Eclipse doesn’t have a human-friendly keyboard shortcut to just run the current program. I add Control-R or Command-R for this purpose by visiting the Eclipse preferences, navigating to General / Keys, searching for and selecting the Run command, and typing the new shortcut in the Binding textbox.