10 Tricks to Boost Your Productivity While Using Eclipse IDE

Hi guys,
Lets see 10 tricks that I find out as cited on eclipsesource.com to Boost Your Productivity While Using Eclipse IDE, which  are worth sharing with you folks.

What I felt from my personal experience is that those who have just begun using Eclipse or have had “some experience” have used Eclipse only as a text editor or handled it in a really heavy way. The main issue being that they have not yet learned about Eclipse’s capabilities and how to utilize its strong features.

So here are the top ten things, which will make your programming life a lot simpler and increase your productivity.
1. Letting Eclipse do the typing - A great IDE must assist the developer in writing his code quite instantaneously. Eclipse does this using Refactoring's, Quick Fixes, Code Assist/Code completion and more.  

2. Type Filters (for PDE / RCP developers) - Type Filters take out suggestions for certain types (e.g. classes, interfaces) from the “Open Type” dialog, content assist and quick fix proposals. As an RCP/SWT developer you would not want suggestions for Swing components like Button, Label, etc. You can find this setting in: Preferences > Java > Appearance > Type Filters

3. Text File Encoding - The default setting for saving files in the Eclipse workspace is through the useof file encoding of the underlying operating system. But you generally want to make a platform independent application. For accommodating this, set the file encoding to UTF-8. Using UTF-8 will prevent problems with special characters if deployed to a system running a different OS, running your build on a UNIX machine or in case someone else works on the code by using a different OS.

4. Save automatically before build - One thing I noticed is that people (including me) are constantly hitting Ctrl+S to save or even worse — grabbing the mouse to hit the Save action in the toolbar. This behavior seems to originate from experiences where an application was started from the workspace without saving and of course, changes were then lost. You can save some keystrokes and mouse clicks by enabling Save automatically before build. This is in: Preferences > General > Workspace

5. Use “Step Filtering” for Debugging – Using “Step Filters” you can filter out types you do not want to see, or step through while debugging. This assists you in staying focused on the actual code and does not expose you to the inner workings where you may not have the source.
6. Always launch the previously launched application - This option is for ensuring that your last launched configuration is utilized. Mentioned in the default setting, Eclipse strives to determine the most appropriate configuration for the currently selected resource that can be quite irksome. Set this under: Preferences > Run/Debug > Launching

7. Storing Your Launch Configuration in a Project – A great deal of time is invested in creating a launch configuration. It can be stored as a file in one of your projects. This allows you to share it with colleagues and save them from reinventing the wheel. You can find it in preference in: Menu: Run > Run Configurations... > Launch Configuration Tab: Common

8. Making a Launch Configuration always appear in the Menu – In case you have various Launch Configurations, you can select your favorite ones and stick them permanently to your Launch/Debug menu. You can go to - Menu: Run > Run Configurations... > Launch Configuration Tab: Common

9. Organising imports on save - The imports are instantly added to the class file. However, changing or removing code might make some imports useless. To fix that, you can Organize Imports by pressing shift+crtl+o or shift+cmd+o on a Mac and your imports will be cleaned up. You can also enable Organize imports on save and Eclipse will take care of it instantly. This can be found in: Preferences > Java > Editor > Save Actions
10. Formatting edited lines on save - The code formatter in Eclipse is quite a handy feature ensuring the code appears consistent in your projects irrespective of who has written it. It can also be easily read and understood by anybody. However, formatting the entire file can mess up the difference between two versions of the file. You can find this in -Preferences > Java > Editor > Save Actions.

Hope these tweaks/tricks will help you improve your productivity with eclipse as it helped me even after roughly 4 years of break. 
HBK Says, " Happy Codding Have Fun " folks.