Essential Eclipse Plugins

Essential Eclipse Plugins - AnyEdit Tools

This is one of the most useful little extensions I have ever come across. It's a plugin that adds several new tools to the context menus in many different Eclipse text-based editors.

I first encountered the power and convenience of this tool on a project to clean up and refactor a crusty old code-base. Too many times in its past history, the developers had used the Copy-Paste-Tweak approach, which left lots of nearly-duplicated code that did 99% of the same thing. Using Eclipse's built-in refactoring tool to Extract Method would not always refactor them all.

Enter the AnyEdit Tool extension that allows us to Compare With Clipboard. Then I could highlight one block of code and copy it to the clipboard, then highlight similar ones and do a Compare to quickly highlight the differences. Yes, I still had to finish the refactoring by hand, but I no longer had the added risk of relying on my visual comparison, or of an external tool.

That wonderful feature is just one small piece of this tool-set.

There are also Sort options that reorder lines in a text file using real-world intelligent sorting, like "Numerically". Number values [3, 30, 33, 321] in a text file might be sorted into [3, 30, 321, 33] when treated as text, but the Sort Numerically feature orders them according to their numeric values. There are other useful Sort options as well.

AnyEdit also provides us with useful Convert features. To upper case, to lower case, invert case, capitalize, Camel-case to/from Underscores, tabs to/from spaces. All items that may crop up occasionally and are a nuisance when they do, unless you have a tool such as AnyEdit.

The Eclipse Marketplace page lists the rest of the features, far more than I have highlighted here.

Summary:

How often I use it: every day
Usefulness: high
Star-rating (1-5): *****
Download: http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/anyedit-tools

How to do Git Rebase in Eclipse

This is an abbreviated version of a fuller post about Git Rebase in Eclipse. See the longer one here : One side-effect of merging Git branches is that it leaves a Merge commit. This can create a history view something like: The clutter of parallel lines shows the life spans of those local branches, and extra commits (nine in the above screen-shot, marked by the green arrows icon). Check out this extreme-case history: http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/branch_madness.jpeg Merge Commits show all the gory details of how the code base evolved. For some teams, that’s what they want or need, all the time. Others may find it unnecessarily long and cluttered. They prefer the history to tell the bigger story, and not dwell on tiny details like every trivial Merge-commit. Git Rebase offers us 2 benefits over Git Merge: First, Rebase allows us to clean up a set of local commits before pushing them to the shared, central repository. For ...

Git Reset in Eclipse

Using Git and the Eclipse IDE, you have a series of commits in your branch history, but need to back up to an earlier version. The Git Reset feature is a powerful tool with just a whiff of danger, and is accessible with just a couple clicks in Eclipse. In Eclipse, switch to the History view. In my example it shows a series of 3 changes, 3 separate committed versions of the Person file. After commit 6d5ef3e, the HEAD (shown), Index, and Working Directory all have the same version, Person 3.0.

Scala Collections: A Group of groupBy() Examples

Scala provides a rich Collections API. Let's look at the useful groupBy() function. What does groupBy() do? It takes a collection, assesses each item in that collection against a discriminator function, and returns a Map data structure. Each key in the returned map is a distinct result of the discriminator function, and the key's corresponding value is another collection which contains all elements of the original one that evaluate the same way against the discriminator function. So, for example, here is a collection of Strings: val sports = Seq ("baseball", "ice hockey", "football", "basketball", "110m hurdles", "field hockey") Running it through the Scala interpreter produces this output showing our value's definition: sports: Seq[String] = List(baseball, ice hockey, football, basketball, 110m hurdles, field hockey) We can group those sports names by, say, their first letter. To do so, we need a disc...

Updating Oracle javapath symlinks on Windows

A Java-based application on my Windows 10 machine recently started prompting me to upgrade my version of Java. Since I wanted to control it myself, I declined the app's offer to upgrade for me, and downloaded and installed the latest Java 8 from Oracle. In my case, Java 1.8.0_171, 64-bit version. The upgrade went fine. But when I launched the app, it again said I needed to upgrade. Why was it still looking at the old location? I made the change using Settings, to change the JAVA_HOME environment variable to point to the location of the new upgrade. But no change, the app still insisted that I needed to upgrade. A little research into the app's execution path showed that it was using c:\ProgramData\Oracle\Java\javapath to find Java. When I looked in that folder, I found symbolic links to my old Java installation. Normally, this hidden bit of information gets updated automatically in the upgrade or installation process. I have read of cases where, when downg...

Multiple Remote Git Repositories and Branches in Eclipse

Sometimes, when using Git repositories and the Eclipse IDE, we want to access other remote repositories within the one we are currently using. One example, which I will use as the scenario for the steps below: a team converted existing code and its history to Git from another source-control management tool, with separate repositories for closely related but distinct release points. When they need to make a fix to a past release, on the past release's "hotfix" branch, they want to do as little work as possible to bring that fix into the current cutting-edge "dev" branch of their main repository. Other writers have offered How-To's for the git command-line steps to do so. What I will do is to show how the setup and configuration can be done within the Eclipse IDE (I used Mars for the screen-shots).

SJGP Software

Search This Blog