Eclipse shortcuts for common SVN commands

When working with SVN, CVS or any other repo, there are some things you’ll just do over and over again. Things like committing files, comparing files and viewing a file’s history are all commonplace actions.

So you might be wondering where the keyboard shortcuts for these actions are, because,  as I mentioned before, you normally work faster with keyboard shortcuts than jumping between the mouse and keyboard all the time. And often the longest part about working with repos is guiding your mouse through treacherous context menus and submenus.

The good news is that there are keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse for the most common repository commands (and not-so-common as well). The bad news is that most of them aren’t configured by default, so you need to set some of them up beforehand. But the 2 minutes spent configuring these may save you hours in the long run.

I’ll be using SVN as the example repository (using Subclipse) but these should apply to your favourite repository integrated into Eclipse (I know that the in-built CVS has these commands as well).

Checkout multiple projects automatically into your Eclipse workspace with Team Project Sets

When working in Eclipse, you’ll often end up with a number of projects in your workspace that constitute an application. You could have a multi-tiered system with a web, server and database project and other miscellaneous ones. Or if you’re an Eclipse RCP developer, you could end up with dozens of plugins each represented by a project.

Although multiple projects give you modularity (which is good), they can make it difficult to manage the workspace (which is bad). Developers have to check out each project individually from different locations in the repository. Sometimes they even have to get projects from multiple repositories. This is a painstakingly long and error-prone task.

But an easier way to manage multiple projects is with Eclipse’s Team Project Sets (TPS). Creating a workspace becomes as easy as importing an XML file and waiting for Eclipse to do its job. Yes, there are other more sophisticated tools out there that do this and more (eg. Maven and Buckminster) but team project sets are a good enough start if you haven’t got anything set up and may be good enough for the longer term as well, depending on how your team works.

Automatically format and cleanup code every time you save

Eclipse has a wonderful feature that formats according to your coding standards. It handles things like indentation, where curly braces are placed, if blank lines should occur between field declaration and hundreds of other options.

However, to invoke this formatting, you have to tell Eclipse to do this every time you’ve edited the code. You can do this using Ctrl+Shift+F but (1) you have to do that every time and (2) you have to remember to do it in the first place (and we all know how good developers are at remembering things).

Eclipse sports a feature called Save Actions that makes formatting code easy. With this feature enabled, every time you save the file, Eclipse formats the code to your formatting preferences and does some cleanup of the code (eg. remove unused imports). All done automatically and for free.