Keyboard Shortcuts
Posted by Mike Haller
on Tuesday, February 24. 2009
at 07:45
in Eclipse
Nice to see that Chetan Kumar Kotha found out about Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDown in Eclipse IDE.However, there's a small caveat here: it doesn't work if one of the open files is an XML file. Let me explain: While tabbing through the open editors using
Ctrl-PgDown you come accross an XML Editor (or in fact any other MultiPageEditor) which will then grab the tabbing focus to its child tabs. Within the same editor, the next Ctrl-PgDown will lead to a switch from "Design" view to "Source" View.Now, that itself wouldn't be bad. The problem lies in the next
Ctrl-PgDown which will not switch to the next open editor, but will switch the child tabs to the "Design" view again. You're stuck with the XML editor from here on. No way to exit the loop with Ctrl-PageUp or Ctrl-PageDown.You can use the mouse or the nice, not so well known editor chooser:
Ctrl-F6Ctrl-F6for switching editorsCtrl-F7for switching viewsCtrl-F8for switching perspectivesCtrl-3for everything else
With Ctr-Shift-L you can see a list of available shortcuts and their description.
One of the newer ones is
Alt-Shift-F1 which will show you the current selection, which is mega for plugin developers:
In my opinion, using keyboard shortcuts makes you more productive. For example, I know a lot of the Eclipse JDT refactorings by heart, which aids me day by day when doing my job.
There is one problem though. There are so many keyboard shortcuts, you can't possibly know them all. Well, at least I can't ...
Regarding the platform, the big amount of keyboard bindings gives you a hard time finding a keyboard shortcut that isn't already used, if you want to contribute a plugin.
Actually a collegue of mine had this problem and chose Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Q, which works but tends to brake my fingers.
Maybe the keyboard just isn't enough anymore ...
http://www.fordcochrane.com/blogs/daford/?m=200710
To stay on topic ... users of shortcuts should take a look at the templates, which are integrated and may be user-defined.
For example in a Java Editor type "test" and hit Ctrl-Space and you can apply a template which creates a JUnit test method. Great thing.
Alas, the next thing to discuss is the curse of Ctrl-Space, which haunts nearly every Eclipse user. You know what I'm talking about when you accidently use Ctrl-Space in every application even when it is a wiki or notepad ...