I use Eclipse IDE already for more than 6 years and of course, I won’t use many shortcut keys for my usage but we should also aware what are the hot keys of Eclipse IDE.

Here, I use Eclipse 3.7 (Indigo) to introduce you all as following shortcut keys:

All in One

  • Ctrl+Shift+L to get a nice list of all the hotkeys, so you might need to remember only this one.

Moving around

To work with different window panels, you might need to switch, search file etc. here are the keys you need:

  • Ctrl+J — Incremental Search (press the hotkeys and type the word you search, it magic !!)
  • Ctrl+Shift+T — Search a type, with dynamic search on typing. You can use only the upcase letters (e.g. type “MIL” to find MouseInputListener)
  • Ctrl+Shift+R – Search a resource with dynamic search on typing. Allow to find any file in the workspace (.java, .xml, etc ..)
  • Ctrl+F6 — Switch between last used files -> change it to alt+q !!!
  • F3 — Open declaration
  • Ctrl+Alt+H — Open Call Hierarchy
  • Ctrl+K / Ctrl+Shift+K – Go to the next/previous occurrence of the underlined word in the editor
  • Shift+F2 – Open external javadocs, select an object type and press the hotkey to see the javadoc if configured, try it with the String object ! You can add all API you want in eclipse

Editing

On the editing panel during your coding, here are the keys you might need to use

  • Ctrl+1 — Quick Fix: press while cursor is positioned at member variable, parameter, selection, warnings, errors, …
  • Ctrl+Space — Context Assist: press after a ., or to use macros (for, while, sysout, …). Press in class-scope to automatically create method declarations.
  • Ctrl+Shift+O — Organize Imports
  • Ctrl+Shift+F — Reformat source
  • Alt+BackArrow and Alt+ForwardArrow — This toggles you back and forth to the files you last had open. Is nice when I’m drilling down thru code and then coming back up again.
  • Alt+Shift+T — Show Refactor Quick Menu
  • Alt-Up and Alt-Down — grab the current line (or all selected lines) and move them up or down
  • Ctrl-Alt-Up and Ctrl-Alt-Down — duplicate the current line (or all selected lines) above or below
  • Ctrl-2 — has some nice keystrokes available for the Source menu, like ctrl-2, L for create local variable.
  • Ctrl-M — Maximize and minimize the current editor

Come with Implementers plugin

  • Alt-F3 — which takes you to the _implementation_ of the item under the cursor. So instead of taking you to List.add(), it would offer you the choice of ArrayList.add() and LinkedList.add(). If there’s only one choice, it jumps straight to it.

Here are the keys mostly I used

  • Ctrl + Shift + T / Ctrl + Shift + R
  • Ctrl + Shift + O / Ctrl + Shift + F / Alt + Shift + T
  • Ctrl + Shift + Y : To Lower Case
  • Ctrl + Shift + X : To Upper Case

How about you?