Eclipse Debugger Loses Focus when Switching Files

Question

When debugging (Juno, SR1 on mac) I prefer using the keyboard keys instead of the mouse to step, step into, step out, go, etc. But these keyboard shortcuts only seem to work when the editor is in focus. The real problem happens when stepping in or out to another file. The editor correctly shows the current line in the new file, but that file is not focused. Consequently, I must grab the mouse and click in that view to re-enable the hotkeys.

This drags my debugging down to a crawl, as I'm constantly having to use the mouse instead of touch-typing. Searches don't find quite this issue. Anyone with work-arounds?

Answer 1

It depends on the Eclipse version. Eclipse 4.2 sucks on Windows and Ubuntu - Due to a bug

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=372941.

Answer 2

Maybe you can change the key bindings:

Go to Window->Preferences - General->Keys, search for "step into", etc. And change in the select box: "When:" to "In Windows" (from "Debugging") or experiment with it to get result you want.

Setting it to "In Windows" I could "Step into" from any focused Eclipse component e.g. Package Manager, Console, Breakpoints, Servers, etc. And even when stepping into file.