{"by":"abalashov","descendants":20,"id":859755,"kids":[859833,860526,859806,861174,859811,859896,859762,860285],"score":4,"text":"Hi everyone,<p>I'm the n00b that posted this question a while back (\"Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?\"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597213<p>Well, your responses - especially the ones that were most convicted about how futile it is to write Java without Eclipse (or at least, one of the big three IDEs) - convinced me to give it another go.<p>Sure enough, I upgraded all my hardware to relatively contemporary 64-bit gear, stocked up on some additional gigabytes of RAM, and now I'm happily writing all my Java in Eclipse. You were right.<p>I'm getting the sense, however, that despite my curiosity and occasional perusal of the documentation, I'm probably not taking advantage of some of the neatest things you can do with it.<p>About 90% of the time, I'm using it the same way I used to edit Java in a text editor. Oh, sure, the highlighting is nice, and I often use the package hierarchical view to navigate to classes or methods -- handy. The auto-indentation, cleanup, templates for common phenomena (try/catch, etc.), assistance in adding imports for unresolved class names, and other little things are all helpful. As some of you pointed out, the refactoring stuff can be pretty good; doing a mass-rename of a method with one click sure beats doing it by hand, or with a one-liner in the shell.<p>Still, I don't feel like I'm getting that much use out of it compared to just writing the code in a shell. My intuition tells me I should be doing more. If you have any tricks you find exceptionally useful or other productivity hacks that are less than entirely obvious, I'd love to know about them.<p>Thanks in advance!","time":1254638281,"title":"Ask HN: Awesome/neat/favourite Eclipse techniques?","type":"story","url":""}