TCF Terminal, Top Eclipse Luna Feature #7

For 10 years Eclipse has set the gold standard for on-time software delivery. Eclipse Luna is just over 1 week away and this year’s release is going to be great. To help celebrate the Eclipse release, I’m counting down the 10 Eclipse Luna features that I’m most excited about.

While developing software, staying focused and in the flow helps maintain productivity. Context switching, distractions and continually moving between tools can easily break the flow. This is one of the reasons Eclipse is such a powerful IDE, since it brings all your development tools into a single workbench.

But as good as Eclipse is, and as large as the ecosystem is, sometimes a tool is just not available as a plug-in. To assist you here, Eclipse now ships with a powerful terminal, providing you access to your system terminal directly from within the IDE. The terminal can be installed into any Eclipse Luna Package.

Once installed, you can spawn a shell directly from within Eclipse.

The terminal is available on all major platforms and supports colours (syntax highlighting), tab completion, copy and paste and even VI Editing (assuming you have vi installed on your system).

The shell also supports remote system access, allowing you to connect to other systems in order to ease deployment, start a remote debugger or kick-off a command line build.

With a proper terminal embedded in Eclipse, integrating with other command line tools should be trivial, keeping our users in the flow.

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