The question dealing with Visual Studio optimizations saved me so much time firing it up and using it I have a hard time going back to Eclipse when I have to do J2EE development. Hence, I was also wondering if people have any tips or tricks to help speed Eclipse up in day to day use.
For information, I'm using the Eclipse version 3.4.1.
one easy thing to do is to allocate more memory to eclipse for big projects using options like: -J-Xms512m -J-Xmx1024m
This is not eclipse specific though.
Eclipse has LOTS of shortcuts, but most of them are not straightforward. E.g.: shift-alt-X, then T to run a JUnit test.
Sometimes you just need to try and see if it works.
I found the editor arrow-key-macros particularly useful, but you need to play with them yourself to understand it: alt+shift+{left,right} to select an expression for refactoring, ctrl+alt+down to duplicate a line, ctrl-shift-{up,down} to jump to previous definition...
The most powerful combinations are usually the alt-shift-something (especially for refactoring).
Look for "eclipse cheat sheets" on google to find some more inspiration.
if you are looking to remove the sluggishness from the app, memory management is obviously important. besides increasing the maximum heap settings and other command line tinkering, there have been eclipse plugins developed in the past that claim to prevent windows from swapping out eclipse RAM. 'Keep Resident' hasnt been updated since 2004, but it is still on the eclipse site and i have heard tell that it works with 3.4. a review is written here
The cheapest and fastest optimization I ever did for Eclipse is to buy extra 2G of RAM for my dev machine.
I think the best way to learn about eclipse shortcuts is to use MouseFeed. MouseFeed is a plugin which shows the corresponding shortcut keys whenever the user uses the mouse to perform some actions. Common tasks and the shortcuts for them can be acquired within a few days. Mousefeed can be found at http://www.mousefeed.com/. Hope this helps.