MouseFeed – Learn your Eclipse shortcuts

By
Jaran Nilsen
Published: October 9, 2009Tags: , , ,

One of the top bullet points on the list of qualities of a productive programmer is to be one with your IDE and editor of choice. You should know every shortcut for the tasks you use on a daily basis, and it can drastically increase your productivity.

A colleague of mine told me about an Eclipse plugin called MouseFeed the other day. It’s a small plugin which will tell you the appropriate combination of key strokes you should use whenever you perform mouse clicks in Eclipse. Not only will it help you learn your Eclipse editor, but also the rest of the Eclipse tools that are just a few key strokes away.

MouseFeed can be configured to simply give you a reminder whenever you use an unnecessary mouse click, or to block your mouse click to enforce the keyboard shortcut. The latter can be a pain in the beginning, but can force you to learn your key strokes in a jiffy!

If you find yourself moving your hand over to the mouse for the majority of your Eclipse operations, MouseFeed is worth checking out.

Do you have similar tools for your favourite IDE? Let us know!

About the Author

I've been working as a lead developer at Integrasco AS since it's startup in 2004. My interests in software development are ranging from the lowest bit to design patterns and development methods. On a daily basis my main area of responsibility is data mining technology as well as a bit of team management. In addition to my work at Integrasco AS, I am also running an open source project called iTunes Agent over on Sourceforge, which provides non-iPod owners with a way to transfer music from iTunes to their media player.