Get nagged about keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse

I was attending the “The Productive Programmer: Mechanics” session, held by Neal Ford, at Oredev last week and I wanted to share one trick that will more or less force you to get faster when developing in Eclipse.

The Eclipse plug-in MouseFeed, written by Andriy Palamarchuk, will repeatedly nag you with what keyboard shortcuts you can use instead of using the mouse to perform actions. For example, if you constantly left-mouse-click the “step-over” button in the debug perspective, the MouseFeed plug-in will pop-up a notification window telling you to instead press “F6” on your keyboard.

You can also make the plug-in even more annoying by having MouseFeed canceling the mouse operation so that you have to use the keyboard shortcut.

I have installed it and forgotten about it until today, when it gently reminded me that collapsing all nodes in the Package Explorer view could be issued by “Shift-Command Numpad_Divide” on Mac OS X. Unfortunately my laptop does not come with a numeric keyboard so I have better to remap the shortcut if I find myself collapsing nodes often.

The MouseFeed home page can be found at: http://www.mousefeed.com
The SourceForge project page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mousefeed

This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. Henrik Bernström

    This would be useful for general Java applications, for example written in Swing, to make users of applications learn keyboard shortcuts for actions faster and in a smooth way.

    I wonder if there exist a library like this. Do you know? I have searched myself, but not found.

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