Eclipse Tips & Tricks - 2022

Presented by Lakshmi P Shanmugam (IBM) at EclipseCon 2022.

The Eclipse IDE celebrated it's 20th anniversary last year. With such a long history of releases, numerous plug-ins & extensions and a huge developer community, it's still one of the most popular IDEs for developers working across multiple domains and languages. Eclipse is especially popular as a Java IDE and has been extended by plugins to support numerous other languages.

The Eclipse IDE is packed with loads of powerful features and capabilities and provides the developers a robust integrated environment for developing, running and debugging applications. With a version of IDE released every quarter, more and more new features and improvements are added that enable it’s users to be more productive in their day to day work.

More often than not the users are unaware of all the capabilities and hence are unable to take full advantage of them. The aim of the session is to highlight the powerful capabilities, share the valuable tips & tricks and enable developers to utilize the IDE to its full potential.

The session will also highlight the useful new and noteworthy features added in the releases in the past year and also the upcoming features in 4.25 release.

Some of the tips that will be demonstrated in the session are:

1. Quickly find and run commands using Find Actions

2. Perform multi-selection and block selection in Editors

3. Code navigation using type hierarchy, call hierarchy, quick outline, etc

4. New debugging improvements such as labelling objects

5. Timesaving shortcuts and preferences

6. Managing projects using Working sets

7. Effectively use the different types of breakpoints such as trigger points, watch points, etc

8. Smart coding and debugging tips

9. Overview of the new E4 spies

10. Useful Plug-in development tips

Objective of the presentation:
The session will demonstrate the cool tips and tricks in action in the Eclipse IDE that are invaluable to users in different aspects of the IDE such as project configuration, editor management, source code navigation, coding, debugging and plug-in development. The objective is to quick-start the users, highlight the powerful capabilities and new features, showcase the hidden gems and enable them to utilize the Eclipse IDE to its full potential.