Hi all,
I've spent some times asking former Eclipse RCP developers now
converted to the 300$/year IDE on what they thing are the best
things that are missing in Eclipse IDE.
What they tell first is the quality of the "quick-fixes" in
IntelliJ. But when you get into details, what makes the difference
isn't really that IJ has editing/refactoring operations that Eclipse
IDE doesn't have, but more that IJ shows the useful ones (and only
the useful ones) on their Alt+Enter.
In Eclipse, a lot of operations are available under Source and
Refactor context menu, but it's a lot of menus to browse, it takes a
lot of time, mostly requires to use mouse, requires to read a lot of
entries that are contextual to the editor but not to the active
selection... It's complicated.
Eclipse has the very good Ctrl+1 menu, which is basically meant to
host such small operations that are in the context of the selection
in an editor. Eclipse IDE (precisely JDT UI) already shows a few
relevant ones, but some other good ones are missing.
So an easy way to improve Eclipse IDE would be to add to the Ctrl+1
the operations that users likes in this very narrow context. If you
get such an idea, please report it to JDT/UI and share it. I believe
fixing that isn't a too difficult task, with no risk at all, and
that it would provide much user satisfaction. It could even be a
great topic for a hackathon.
I plan to make a more direct comparison of these quick-fixes one day
(cannot be more precise, so don't wait for me if you're faster) and
to come up with a list of the ones that are missing in Eclipse IDE
to make this Ctrl+1 so efficent that user won't have to dig in the
context-menu and will always get their favorite operation in a few
keystrokes.
Cheers,
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