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!