Eclipse Preferences You Need to Know

Lately there have been many discussions regarding Eclipse preferences because of sites like ihateeclipse.com. The Number 1 complaint on this site is that Eclipse’s resources get out of sync with the file system and, as a result, the user has to press F5. I’ve also run into this more than once ;). Anyway, since I’m pretty much an Eclipse power user I have spent some time putting together my personal Eclipse default preferences. With this post I want to share them with you. They might help you with some small efficiencies or better, can maybe act as a kind of template for new Eclipse defaults. So, let’s get our hands wet…

Refresh on Access aka “out of sync with file system”

[ “Workspace”_. This instructs Eclipse to “press F5” automatically when opening a file.

Workspace Encoding

[ “Workspace”_.

Tabs vs. Spaces

[ “Text Editors”_.

Line Numbers

[ “Text Editors”_.

Print Margin

[ “Text Editors”_.

Default Launchers

[ “Launching”_.

Appearance

[ “Appearance”_.

Open Perspective

[ “Perspectives”_.

Spell Checking

[ “Spelling”_.

Java: Semicolons

[ “Typing”_.

Java: Templates

[ “Templates”_.

Java: Content Assist Favorites

[ “Favorites”_.

Java: Type Filters

[ “Type Filters”_.

Java: Save Actions

[ “Save Actions”_.

Web Development: Default Browser

[ “Web Browser”_.

That’s it…

A colleague of mine wrote a post a few months ago about debugging in Eclipse and how to become more productive with Eclipse. I recommend reading them because he has described other useful preferences which are not in this post. If you know about other cool preferences please share them with us in a comment. And as always, feel free to disagree ;).