Is it possible to work in Eclipse with keyboard only?

Question

as most of us surely do every now and then, I try to improve my workflow. As Eclipse is my main IDE, I wondered if it may be possible to use it without mouse. I browsed the available shortcuts and tried to use them instead of my mouse. I found interesting features like Ctrl+3 which opens something like the Apple spotlight.

I know there are a lot of questions concerning favorite shortcuts etc. but I'd like to know if it works because at the moment it feels a bit squishy 100% without mouse.

So is anyone out there using Eclipse like that? And are there some hints to ease the change?

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible. For a start, check out 10 Eclipse navigation shortcuts every java programmer should know. When you use these 10 shortcuts and some of the shortcuts of the comments, you will already see a big performance boost.

The "open type" and "open resource" dialogs are CamelCase-sensitive, so when typing "NPE" in the open type dialog, I get two matching items NoPermissionException and NullPointerException. So using good names with consistent spelling is a must.

Ctrl+F11 starts a program, F11 debugs it. Note howewer to check if in Window-Preferences-Run/Debug-Launching the value of "Launch Operation" is set to your needs.

You may want to customize the search dialog (Ctrl+h) to only show the file search (default is to context sensitively present you with different search tabs).

Ctrl+n allows you to create something new (opens a wizard with an initial filter text to filter the possible next pages).