Does the Eclipse editor have an equivalent of Emacs's "align-regex"?

Question

I've been using Eclipse pretty regularly for several years now, but I admit to not having explored all the esoterica it has to offer, particularly in the areas of what formatting features the editors offer.

The main thing I miss from (X)emacs is the "align-regex" command, which let me take several lines into a region and then format them so that some common pattern in all lines was aligned. The simplest example of this is a series of variable assignments:

var str = new String('aString');
var index = 0;
var longCamelCaseObjectName = new LongNameObject();

After doing align-regex on "=", that would become:

var str                     = new String('aString');
var index                   = 0;
var longCamelCaseObjectName = new LongNameObject();

Now, you may have your own thoughts on stylistic (ab)use of white space and alignment, etc., but that's just an example (I'm actually trying to align a different kind of mess entirely).

Can anyone tell me off-hand if there's an easy key-combo-shortcut for this in Eclipse? Or even a moderately-tricky one?

Answer 1

You can set the formatter to do this:

Preferences -> Java -> Code Style -> Formatter. Click 'Edit' on the profile (you may need to make a new one since you can't edit the default).

In the indentation section select 'Align fields with columns'.

Then, in your code CTRL+SHIFT+F will run that formatter.

That will of course run all the other rules, so you may want to peruse the various options here.

Answer 2

Version 2.8.7 of the Emacs+ plugin now supplies a fairly complete align-regexp implementation in Eclipse