Monday, August 27, 2007

I love Eclipse now more than ever

Eclipse has always been a very useful platform, with tons of little developer driven quirks that make the programmer's job so muche easier. I found this out especially lately when I've been trying to get into developing with C# in Visual Studio 2005, and I've been missing features that are just there in Eclipse, but you have to buy a plugin for with VS2k5. And here's the great thing about that whole situation : you can develop C# in Eclipse on Windows with a free plugin. But that's really all just a side note. The main point of this post is this : I just now observed an exceedingly useful feature that's been in Eclipse for several versions. Ever press Ctrl + Shift + T to open the quick loader for classes ? It has a text bar at the top so you can type in the simple name of the class you're looking for and it'll filter out the results. In the filtering options up top, there's the usual ? and * filters, but beside that there's also a spot that says "TZ - TimeZone" which I've never really noticed before, and I don't know what made me notice it today. I typed in TZ, and much to my surprise, a whole list of classes remained in the window, filtered, and they all had TZ capital letters in them, following the general naming conventions in Java. Intrigued by this, I typed in MPREF (ManualPaymentRequestEntryFlow) which is a class in my project that I just finished working on, and sure enough, it filtered the list to have that in it (it was the only class not filtered out) . I thought that was just the greatest filter I'd ever seen. And to build on it, if you use the content assist hotkey (Ctrl + Space) with the same scheme, it automatically fills in those classes for you. How cool is that !?

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