Hungry Backspace in Eclipse?

Question

In some editors there exist plugins implementing a feature called "hungry backspace" or "hungry delete".

If this mode is active in a text editor then one hit to the backspace key will automatically delete all whitespace chars backwards from the current cursor position up to the first non-whitespace character.

For example, this feature exists for Emacs and IntelliJ IDEA.

Does anyone know if it is also available in Eclipse?

Answer 1

Alt-Del is probably as close as you're going to get without writing a plugin yourself. Others have asked for this feature (coming from intelliJ) but so far it doesn't exist, or it's not published.

Answer 2

CTRL-backspace is pretty close too: delete previous word:

function();    (4 spaces)

+ CTRL-BACKSPACE gives:

function

Other than that, AnyEdit plugin can convert trailing spaces into tabs (but also into "", effectively removing them)

Answer 3

In SciTE, and Eclipse (3.4), Ctrl+Shift+Del with the caret after the last visible character will delete these spaces. Ie. it deletes from caret to end of line.

Actually, in SciTE I don't need to do that, since I have set it up to automatically remove these trailing spaces when saving.

Note: In Preferences > General > Keys, there is a Remove Trailing Whitespace binding (without key assignment by default) which seems to apply to File.

Answer 4

Ctrl+Shift+Left, Backspace always works for me. works in notepad, web browsers, everywhere. Stick to the standards :)