Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Eclipse Galileo Release


The upcoming Eclipse Galileo Release is currently in RC state. This post highlights some of the new features.

Update-Manager
Finally, the update manager works again. With the Ganymede release I really had huge problems to install updates, both on my working machine and my personal machine. Mostly because of some strange error messages. In Galileo the update manager works fine and its design has been improved.

Tabbing
One thing that always bothered me in previous versions of Eclipse was an issue with tabbing through opened editors by hitting Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown. As soon as you tabbed into an tab which itself had multiple tabs (such as the XML editor has a source tab and a design tab) you simply could not tab further outside of this tab.



Now this works fine. Within an editor with multiple tabs you can tab through the tabs with Alt+PgUp/PgDown.

toString() generation
Another nice thing is, that you can generate toString() automatically from the source menu.
The dialog lets you customize the way in which it's generated with different aspects: the fields to be included, the template to be used, a style (String concatenation, StringBuilder, String.format, ...) and other options (e.g. null-value handling).



Open Type
The "Open Type" dialog (Ctrl+T) allows for searching by type name patterns, e.g. the camel case letters. That's not new. But now these pattern latters are highlighted. The "Open Resource" dialog does not support this feature, though.


Rectangular selection
Editors now support rectangular selection. Press Alt+Shift+A to activate. Might be helpful in some situations.




Rename via Quick fix
Rename refactoring is available via Quick fix (Ctrl+1).


Constructor auto completion
The auto completion feature now is able to show all available constructors of a class. Before, only the type was available for selection.



Support for inheritDoc
The JavaDoc view now support the inheritDoc tag.



Mylyn planning icon
This is a minor one. Mylyn makes it easier to set the scheduling of a task by adding a button to the task editor's toolbar.



Compare View
In the Compare Editor many enhancements have been made, but I haven't had a deeper look at these. New Features include some of the features of the Java Editor, including auto completion, hyperlinking, java doc on hover, go to line and quick outline.

Patch pasting
Sounds nice, but haven't tried it yet: It's possible to apply a patch by simply pasting in the project explorer.

Still Line Break Issues
One thing that not has been fixed, is that sometimes when Generics are used, the formatter does not break the line even if it contains more characters than the maximum allowed.