Cool Eclipse IDE Plugins your Should Check out

The Eclipse IDE from the non-profit eclipse Foundation are known for its plugins ecosystem and theeclipse hosts A huge amount of plugins that can download to customize your Eclipse workbench. I recently scanned the marketplace just to the if there are anything interesting I could find. In the fact, I did find some plugins that I am the are cool, but is not very well-known, so it ' s this I ' d like to share with You. Popular vs Cool

There are some qualities of plugins that I ' d as to mention. The all, I ' d-stress that I ' m looking in the plugins that are not tools on their own, and therefore my Favouri TES like JRebel for Eclipse and JBoss Tools are not on the list. The plugins I mention are just nice little extensions specifically designed for jazzing up your vanilla Eclipse IDE I Nstallation.

Secondly, popular doesn ' t mean cool. There ' A top list of popular plugins in marketplace, which almost haven ' t changed during last 2-3 years.

It would be quite boring for me to accept this if a plugin is-cool just because it is popular and are in the most Downloade D plugins list at the marketplace. The popular plugins are there just because the essential functionality the plugins in Eclipse By default. This is why the Maven, Subversion and Git plugins are in the top there. Plugins I are cool courtesy of a shell

Although I ' m a Java developer, sometimes I have play with Shell scripting and there are a couple of plugins that are L for this work. The shelled plugin adds shell script editing capabilities while the Terminal plugin the shell write into the Ec Lipse Workbench.

With shelled and Terminal plugins I can write the scripts and try them out directly in the Eclipse window without SwitchIn g between different windows. Efficiency ftw! Edit like a boss!

The next plugins on our list are more Clipboard, Smart Save and Anyedit. These plugins improve I editing experience in Eclipse by a order of magnitude.

More Clipboard keeps track of the latest entries copied/cut into Clipboard buffer and allows your to quickly paste Popup list by pressing a hotkey. Yeah, let ' s accept that–we does a lot of copy-paste while editing code:)

The Anyedit plugin, by Andrey Loskutov, adds a bunch of editing to Eclipse. Can sort the contents of files and selections, encode HTML snippets, quickly convert between tabs and spaces and much More. This is a Must-have plugin for Eclipse, I ' d say.

Primarily, I ' an A IntelliJ idea user and one of the essential differences for me with the Eclipse editor is-in-idea t He editor saves the changes automatically. So I is looking for something similar in Eclipse and found the Smart Save plugin, which can is configured to Automaticall Y Save the change after some timeout. Cool and handy!

Although, I am the It might have some impact on the editing experience since in Eclipse it's quite common to have the Comp Ile on the Save option turned on by default and so eventually leads Eclipse to doing a clean build. So theoretically, it might happen this you have just edited something, but Eclipse decides to does a full build and blocks T He workbench. Spice up your look!

Next up, the Eclipse Color Theme-plugin is the ' only one ' in my list of ' is ' also quite popular on Eclipse marketplace. This plugin allows your to setup a color scheme for your Eclipse editor and comes with a number of nice themes out of the The B Ox.

Roboticket color scheme

Personally, I prefer the roboticket color scheme but there also plenty of others to choose from, such as the Monokai them E below.

Monokai color scheme

Continuous Feedback

If you are a fan of the continuous feedback approach in development and your enjoy writing unit tests (this is why unit test s are awesome) then might find the Jloop and Junitloop plugins very. These plugins can execute code if any changes are made. I found it working quite nicely with junitloop–when I changed a (a) this is exercised by me unit test, the test is Re-executed automatically, providing a rapid feedback to my changes.

Automation Maniac

Your strive for efficiency might leads to the beautiful land of automation. Unfortunately, there ' s no built-in support for macros to Eclipse, so can ' t just the record and replay your. However, there ' a few plugins that make it possible to automate different activities in the IDE by leveraging scripting s Upport.

Scripteclipse plugin adds _scripts_ project to the workspace

One of the the plugins in this niche is groovymonkey which are not actively maintained. Other alternatives are scripteclipse and Eclipsescript plugins (don ' t confuse the two!).

Essentially, the idea are similar behind all these implementations–the engine exposes some of the internal Eclipse objects To the script where your can implement your own logic according to your requirements. The scripts are then stored in the workspace and, for accessibility, the plugin composes a menu from the list of script fi Les.

Know your way around

One last plugin which I ' d like to mention in this post are the ide++ plugin that helps you to explore better and more Effici ent ways of doing things in Eclipse installation.

It analyses your activities and tries to give your suggestions for a quicker to do the way task. For instance, if I tried to close all editor tabs One-by-one, the plugin detected this and notified me with a nicely-s Tyled popup basically saying "Hey geek, did you know there the there's a more efficient way to close the tabs by using CTR L+shift+w? ". Unfortunately the plugin doesn ' t know that it'll be is a bit different on Mac:)

ide++ Popup

I really liked the "idea behind" ide++ Plugin–it helps you-detect inefficiencies in your of Eclipse, so I usage The plugin would be developed further. Summary

If you ' re a Eclipse user, some of the plugins mentioned in this post should help you understand your IDE better and E Ven code more efficiently in Eclipse. Hopefully, you ' ve found this plugins just as cool as I have. Please leave comments If:you enjoyed reading this your have tips & tricks to share about the Eclipse plugins you want us to cover no other specific areas of Eclipse for are a serial commenter that cannot avoid leaving your remarks;)

We are actually planning to more posts in Eclipse IDE for Java developers, getting into the deeper technical as We progress, and publish More rebel labs content on this subject...so let us know what your ' d like to see! ANTON Arhipov Anton Arhipov is JRebel Product leads at Zeroturnaround. It is a Java enthusiast, vim fan and IntelliJ addict. Professional interests include programming languages, middleware and tooling. Anton loves tea and doesn ' t drink coffee. He tweets from  @antonarhipov  and and can find him at  LinkedIn. More Posts