CFEclipse and Eclipse Tips and Tricks
CFEclipseI've been working off, and mostly on, with CFEclipse over the past two years. In the last week or so, though, I've found three cool new (to me) shortcuts and thought I would share them.
"Firefox like Find"
In the Find dialog click the Incremental option and Eclipse will do a Firefox like Find, searching as you type, of the currently open file. I love the way Firefox searches and the added bonus in CFEclipse is that it will expand collapsed code as this screen shot shows:
Removing Comments
Adding comments in CFEclipse is easy, either (Ctrl/Command-Shift-M) or click on the comment icon, and if text is selected the comment will surround it. Removing comments can be done the same way, either select the whole comment or place the cursor to the left of the open comment and either (Ctrl/Command-Shift-M) or click on the comment icon.
Go to Line
Ctrl/Command-L brings up a dialog asking which line you would like to go to. Very useful when debugging an error and you know the line the error occurs on.
What keyboard shortcuts do you use?
A Week With CF Frameworks Explorer
CFEclipseI have been using the CF Frameworks Explorer, an Eclipse plugin that helps navigate framework configuration files, for a week now. While it is still in alpha stage, I have found it to be very helpful and bug-free.
Installation was straightforward by using the software update in Eclipse (Help > Software Update > Find & Install > Search for Updates of the currently installed features > Finish. Then follow prompts to update for all CFEclipse features including an extras folder.) Once Eclipse restarts go to Window > Show View > Other > CF Framework and the CF Framework Explorer will appear in the middle bottom panel. From there you can drag it wherever you like.
Once running the CF Frameworks Explorer provides a visual way to navigate your configuration files with icons, collapsible sections and color coding. I use XMLBuddy to edit XML files and while this provides auto-completion it does not have any code coloring other than turning it all blue. This makes navigating a large Mach-II file rather difficult. Not so with the CF Frameworks plugin as you can see from the picture below. When you click on a element it will open the configuration file, highlight the relevant section and adjust the scrollbars so it appears in the middle-ish of your screen.
(My7MachBlog is the name of the project as defined in Eclipse). By default I believe CFEclipse will find your configuration files and folders. I add a cfm extension to both Mach-II and ColdSpring configuration xml files so had to register the configuration files by right clicking on them > CF Frameworks > Set/Unset as Configuration File. For more on the features watch the screencast by Mark Drew in CFEclipse TV.
After one week I can strongly recommend adding CF Frameworks Explorer, indeed, I find myself using it so much that I wish that in addition to opening up the XML file it could open up the actual file. Many thanks to Mark Drew for this excellent addition to CFEclipse.
Other related links; Mark Drew will be presenting to the CF Frameworks workshop on Thursday, May 17th at 2pm (EST), there is a CF Frameworks screencast on CFEclipse TV and there is a campaign underway to make Mark Drew rich or at least compensate him for his work on CFEclipse.
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