Is it possible to work in Eclipse with keyboard only?

Question

Hi there,

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).

Answer 2

I'm a blind programmer who uses eclipse. While there are plenty of shortcuts I find people often overlook using menus from the keyboard. If there's a function you use a lot that doesn't appear to be supported with keyboard shortcuts you can either create a shortcut to it in prefferences or use keyboard shortcuts such as alt+f to access the file menu and a one letter combination that allows you to access the item. For example hit alt+f then a to access the save as dialog. The underlined letter is the one you want to hit once in the menu.

Answer 3

Here you get an Eclipse Shortcut Overview PDF file of all key bindings. This file you can print and put beside your keyboard if you wish.

Answer 4

There are a couple of things you can do to improve your keyboard:mouse usage ratio with Eclipse.

First off, if you push Ctrl-Shift-L, it shows you a master list of all the shortcuts you can use. If you know what you want to do, this is usually a quicker way of doing it without having to dig through menus, and as a bonus, you will learn some shortcuts you didn't know before.

The other thing you can try is a plugin called MouseFeed which looks promising. It tells you the shortcut for any menu item you use and if there isn't one, reminds you to create one. It essentially acts as training wheels until you become as close to 100% keyboard use as possible. I'm not sure how well it works in 3.4, but you can give it a shot.

Hope that helps.