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[ide-dev] Ctrl-1 driven development

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,
--
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat
My blog - My Tweets

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