Boost productivity with Eclipse shortcuts

Posted by on Jan 30, 2013 in PHP Programming | 2 Comments

Have you ever wondered how to improve productivity? There are many ways which requires different level of commitment and time to learn. One of the simplest yet very powerful is taking advantage of keyboard shortcuts in your IDE.

Eclipse comes with a comprehensive set of features hidden behind different combinations of keys . All of them are useful and help saving time. If you will try to get into a habit of using all of them at the same time you will most likely quit after 5 minutes. It’s too much. I suggest starting with few (3 to 5 should be enough) and gradually add more.

Here are five very useful Eclipse shortcuts:

Open Resource
CTRL + SHIFT + R – search for a file by name

Open Resource
Quick Outline
CTRL + O – move quickly to a method

Quick Outline
Format
CTRL + SHIFT + F – formats selected block of code

Format
Move lines Up / Down
ALT + ARROW UP/DOWN – moves line or selected block of code up or down

movelines
Quick Switch Editor
CTRL + E – brings list of opened files

Quick Switch
It’s amazing how the programming experience can improve if you don’t have to take your hands of the keyboard. You not only perform certain tasks faster but it also limits distraction.

2 Comments

  1. Daniel Gafitescu
    22/03/2013

    You should try Sublime Text 2.
    I have started with Eclipse then move to Netbeans and for the last 6 months I am using Sublime Text 2 and there is no going back.

    Just give it a try and check tutsplus.com/course/improve-workflow-in-sublime-text-2

    Reply
    • Lukasz Kujawa
      24/03/2013

      Thank you for your suggestion. I have Sublime installed but I’m not in a habit to use it. For sure it’s faster then Eclipse but changing IDE behaviour is a massive step for me ;-)

      Reply

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