Easy ways to identify different branches when using Eclipse

When working on different branches in Eclipse, you’ll often find yourself wondering if you’re working in the right workspace for the right branch. This is especially an issue if you have multiple Eclipse instances open and you’re working on different branches of the same codebase, eg. dev, fix, release and feature branches.

There are a number of features in Eclipse that can help you distinguish which window belongs to which branch, including naming your workspace, naming perspectives and colouring your window.

Most features don’t show you the actual branch (ie. its name as it exists in the SCM) but they enable you to manually mark a workspace as belonging to a branch.

Compare two workspace or external files in Eclipse

We all have our favourite diff tools for comparing files and it’s probably not Eclipse itself, unless you’re comparing version controlled files.

But sometimes you’ll want to compare two files from within Eclipse (whether they are in your workspace or external files) either because it’s quicker or you don’t have your own diff tool to hand.

Eclipse offers two ways of comparing files with each other. One of them is appropriately called Compare with Each Other. Although this is often the suggested way to compare files, it’s not easy to use and doesn’t work with external files. This post will focus on another Eclipse feature called Compare with Other Resource that makes things go a bit smoother and handles external files but it will also cover using Compare with Each Other.

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.