Can you enable variable highlighting with Eclipse PDT?

Question

I'm using version 3.3.2, I know that regular Eclipse for Java does variable highlighting. Notepad++ does it regardless of what language you're using (if you select any text, it highlights similar text)

I know it's not critically important, and a back/forward incremental search is an adequate workaround, but it would be nice to have.

Update Looks like I had PDT 1.03, (current version is 2.0), I have Eclipse 3.2.2. Needed to look in "Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration", not just "Help -> About".

Answer 1

I think your question in poorly worded. Syntax highlighting, and highlighting all similar strings are very different.

Answer 2

Not sure about PDT but I would suggest to try PHPEclipse plugin instead, which is much more powerful. It gives you pretty much everything that Eclipse provides for java - marking occurrences, Ctrl-click navigation, code completion, etc.

Answer 3

I believe 'mark occurrences' is the option which is the closest of what you call 'syntax highlighting'

But PHP Development Tools (PDT) had not that feature in 2007, according to this discussion.

However this bug says PDT1.1 has now the ability to mark occurrences.

Full description in this pdf document.

Answer 4

You can download new PDT 2.0 All-in-one together with Eclipse 3.4 - this feature as "mark occurences" is here an there is some new features. I use it now and found it stable.

http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/downloads/

Answer 5

Another trick is to highlight the word then right click -> refactor -> rename OR just Alt-Shift-R

This highlights all occurrences of the variable.

Esc key to stop highlighting.

Just be sure you don't accidentally rename it (easy enough to undo if you do).