Eclipse optimizations

Question

The question dealing with Visual Studio optimizations saved me so much time firing it up and using it I have a hard time going back to Eclipse when I have to do J2EE development. Hence, I was also wondering if people have any tips or tricks to help speed Eclipse up in day to day use.

For information, I'm using the Eclipse version 3.4.1.

How about the optimization where you "DON'T PAY $2000 FOR A LICENSE" or where you "use it on Linux or Mac... or any OS". <<<>>> FYI, I prefer to use development tools that are cross platform and I also like to use open source as much as possible. — Trevor Boyd Smith, Jun 11 '09 at 11:20
I forgot about the optimization where you "don't have to wait 2 bloody hours for it to install and upgrade and upgrade and... *snore* — Trevor Boyd Smith, Jun 11 '09 at 11:22
> Trevor : This question is *not* meant to provoke an IDE war. At work, I use both Eclipse and Visual Studio, and love both of them for a ton of different reasons. This question does not compare them by any means, it just asks for optimization tricks for one whereas the other has already been dealt with: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8440/visual-studio-optimizations. I don't care about the price, or the cross-platform part. I only care about Eclipse optimizations (see the title...) — Gad, Jun 11 '09 at 12:39

VonC · Accepted Answer · 2019-06-19T20:11:28.527

24

There are:

system optimizations: eclipse.ini
shortcuts optimizations:
- Quick Access (Ctrl+3) (the mother of all shortcuts! With it, you can access almost everything in Eclipse)
- Quick Fix (you should make sure it has a convenient shortcut attached to it)
  
  (that includes Run or Debug configurations available in your workspace since 4.12)
launchers optimizations : save them with your projects and do not forget to uncheck the option "Delete configurations when associated resource is deleted" in the "Run/Launching/Launch Configuration" preference panel:

And then there are the configuration of:

project preferences
perspectives (which you can configure across multiple screens)
provisioning mechanism p2 (with bundle pools to share plugins across multiple eclipse installations)

edited Jun 19 '19 at 20:11

answered Jun 05 '09 at 19:11

VonC

1,262,500
529
4,410
5,250

1

Looks like your eclipse badge is on its way. Congrats! – Michael Myers Jun 05 '09 at 19:28
@mmyers, thank you. It is due since 12:00 GMT, but I guess it is only computed at 0:00GMT. Still 3h30 to wait from the time of this comment ;) – VonC Jun 05 '09 at 20:39
You miss some obvious optimization like uninstall Mylyn, disable p2, etc. They remove feature, but make startup faster. – J-16 SDiZ Jun 11 '09 at 04:31
Uninstall Mylyn? Eclipse alone does not come with Mylyn. Disable p2? By default, the Automatic Updates is disabled... – VonC Jun 11 '09 at 06:52
There's a shortcut I use to play with: ctrl + shift + L. It shows you a bunch of other shortcuts. – axcdnt Apr 02 '13 at 17:41
`Ctrl + 1` for `Quick Fix`. – KrishPrabakar Feb 24 '15 at 11:55

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 12 '09 at 16:27

4

The cheapest and fastest optimization I ever did for Eclipse is to buy extra 2G of RAM for my dev machine.

answered Jun 12 '09 at 16:27

Vladimir Dyuzhev

18,130
10
48
62

score 4 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 15 '09 at 07:13

I think the best way to learn about eclipse shortcuts is to use MouseFeed. MouseFeed is a plugin which shows the corresponding shortcut keys whenever the user uses the mouse to perform some actions. Common tasks and the shortcuts for them can be acquired within a few days. Mousefeed can be found at http://www.mousefeed.com/. Hope this helps.

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 05 '09 at 19:03

2

one easy thing to do is to allocate more memory to eclipse for big projects using options like: -J-Xms512m -J-Xmx1024m

This is not eclipse specific though.

answered Jun 05 '09 at 19:03

z -

7,130
3
40
68

G B · Answer 5 · 2009-06-08T15:57:22.213

Eclipse has LOTS of shortcuts, but most of them are not straightforward. E.g.: shift-alt-X, then T to run a JUnit test.

Sometimes you just need to try and see if it works.

I found the editor arrow-key-macros particularly useful, but you need to play with them yourself to understand it: alt+shift+{left,right} to select an expression for refactoring, ctrl+alt+down to duplicate a line, ctrl-shift-{up,down} to jump to previous definition...

The most powerful combinations are usually the alt-shift-something (especially for refactoring).

Look for "eclipse cheat sheets" on google to find some more inspiration.

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 11 '09 at 04:44

if you are looking to remove the sluggishness from the app, memory management is obviously important. besides increasing the maximum heap settings and other command line tinkering, there have been eclipse plugins developed in the past that claim to prevent windows from swapping out eclipse RAM. 'Keep Resident' hasnt been updated since 2004, but it is still on the eclipse site and i have heard tell that it works with 3.4. a review is written here

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 16 '19 at 00:24

The biggest optimization I've found for Eclipse is turning off Theming. My very minimal installation was extremely slow, so I wasted a ton of time doing all the debugging steps until I finally unchecked "General > Apperence > Enable theming" and everything got much much faster. I also put -server in my eclipse.ini, but, the biggest trick was just turning off theming (with much much sadness).

Eclipse optimizations

7 Answers7

Linked