As Lars points out on the ide-dev mailing list, a lot of Eclipse IDE users aren’t aware of some very handy features, especially the one-feature-to-rule-them-all: Quick Access.
In an Eclipse IDE, Quick Access will take you quickly to the feature you need. To activate Quick Access, type Ctrl+3 and start typing (or click in the entry field in the toolbar and start typing).
Quick Access will find and list all of the features that match what you type, including commands, views, editors, menus, preferences, and perspectives. Selecting an entry will take the appropriate action for whatever is selected (e.g. invoke the command or open the preferences page).
Note that if they exist, the list of available features will include key bindings. You get at the full list of key bindings (Key Assist) by typing Ctrl+Shift+L.
I’m not sure what the key bindings for Quick Access or Key Assist are on the Mac, but if you’re using a Mac, start typing in the Quick Access toolbar field to find out…
Quick-Assist is shotcut is `Cmd+3` on OSX
I forgot the shortcut for proper English
It always puzzled me, why that search doesn’t search for resources or classes in the workspace…
I’m working on a patch that will make the Quick Access extensible via plug-in. I’ve been experimenting with a Google search extension, but searching classes and resources would be another cool option.
Wayne, please make is also find editors by the file/class name.
I mostly miss the ability to type the same keywords into Quick Access, that I can type into the preferences dialog. Quick Access can only search for the page titles of the preference page tree, but not for anything inside those pages.
E.g. you can search for “network” in both, but “proxy” is only found in the preference search itself.
So a plugin to “forward” the quick access search to the preference search should be a default implementation of your new extension point.
In my eclipse Ctrl+Shift+L is reserved for spring ide’s quick search 😉
Cmd-Shift-R can be used on a Mac to search for a ‘resource’ – any file in your workspace. And Cmd-Shift-T can be used to search by ‘type’ – type in a class name, and it’s definition will come up.
Yup. And we’re talking about rolling that find type/file functionality in to Quick Access as well. I’m not quite sure what that will look like.
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