How about this…

Start typing the name of a method (where a method should go). Don’t worry about the return type or anything else, just the name. Hit ctrl-space. Eclipse will offer to build a new private method with that name. Type “main” and hit ctrl-space and it will build you a new main method stub (complete with all the necessary parameters and return types).

Or… highlight a few lines of code in an existing method and hit ctrl-space. Down near the bottom of suggestions are a few interesting ones, including “do”, “for”, “if”, “runnable”, and others. Select one of these and it will wrap the selected code with a “do” loop, “for” loop, and so on. “Runnable is my favourite; it wraps the code in a new instance of java.lang.Runnable instance.

So…

  private void whatDoYouGetWhenYouMultiplySixByNine() {      doSomething();      doSomethingElse();  }

becomes…

  private void whatDoYouGetWhenYouMultiplySixByNine() {      new Runnable() {          public void run() {              doSomething();              doSomethingElse();          }      }  }

The best part is that if you look at how these templates are defined, it’s pretty easy to sort out how to define your own. More on that later…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.