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I'm doing some Android development, and I much prefer Visual Studio, but I'll have to use Eclipse for this.

Has anyone made a tool which can make Eclipse look and behave more like visual studio? I mainly can't stand its clippyesqe suggestions on how I should program (Yes, I know I have not yet used that private field! Thanks Eclipse!), or its incredibly lousy intellisense.

For example, in eclipse, if I don't type this first, its intellisense won't realise I want to look for locally scoped members. Also, the TAB to complete VS convention is drilled into my head, and Eclipse is ENTER to complete, I could switch everything by hand but that would take hours, and I was hoping someone had some sort of theme or something that has already done it.

BillHaggerty
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FlySwat
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    "in eclipse, if I don't type "this" first, its intellisense won't realize I want to look for locally scoped members" Um, yes it does. – skaffman Sep 28 '08 at 15:30
  • My version doesn't, perhaps its a configuration issue. – FlySwat Sep 28 '08 at 15:34
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    Easiest way to make Eclipse like VS: Uninstall debugger, use only Navigator instead of Project Viewer, hide every single tab at the bottom, randomly spread keyboard shortcuts all around the keyboard. Done! :( – Esko May 28 '10 at 19:19
  • Hey guys. I have written an article on what I did to make Eclipse both look and work more like VS: http://www.jackyliang.com/jackybegincoding/2014/4/5/make-eclipse-work-more-like-visual-studio Feel free to check it out. I am sure I share a lot of your frustrations. – theGreenCabbage Apr 06 '14 at 20:30

4 Answers4

15

Have you tried using the Visual Studio keybindings available in Eclipse Ganymede (3.4)?

(You may want to know that "IntelliSense" is a Visual Studio-term, an probably unknown to anyone without Visual Studio-experience. "Autocompletion" is probably a more widely used term.)

JesperE
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    You also need the C++ development tools installed: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/200499/visual-studios-keybindings-for-eclipse/544635#544635 – Luke Quinane Feb 13 '09 at 03:50
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    Three years later, playing with Eclipse for the first time, it should be noted that this is still true: Eclipse (now on Indigo) still only comes with "default" and "emacs" keybindings. Installed the c++ development tools (from Help->"Install new software"), the VS keybindings became available (from Window->Preferences->General->Keys). Eclipse puts things in weird places... definitely not the menus I would've expected either of those commands to be found. – neminem Dec 11 '11 at 01:35
15

There are also other choices for Java IDEs. You've obviously found Eclipse, but you also may want to check out IntelliJ and NetBeans. IntelliJ is not free, but has a 30 day evaluation period and a Visual Studio key map :)

Shop around, find one that you like and start to use it heavily. They are all very good IDEs, and I'm sure once you use one for a while you'll get comfortable with it.

Steve K
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    Eclipse is the only IDE with support for the Android plugin, I could adapt Visual Studio to work with Android with the same amount of effort it would take to do IntelliJ or NetBeans. – FlySwat Sep 28 '08 at 15:30
  • There is an Android Plugin for IntelliJ. http://code.google.com/p/idea-android/wiki/GettingStarted – Steve K Sep 28 '08 at 15:40
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    There is also an Android plugin for NetBeans. http://wiki.netbeans.org/IntroAndroidDevNetBeans – Steve K Sep 28 '08 at 15:41
  • The IntellIJ plugin looks like it may be suffering from bit rot. It hasn't been updated for the recent Android releases :(. (See the comments and the end of the getting started page) You might have better luck starting with NetBeans. – Steve K Sep 28 '08 at 16:02
  • Note that IntelliJ 9 has an open-source community version, which can be acquired free of charge. – Nik Reiman Jan 25 '10 at 10:34
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If you start typing the name of any class/variable visible in the current scope and hit Ctrl+Space, it'll bring down the autocompletion.

By default, tab is used to move around autocompleted function call arguments.

3

I'm gonna play devils advocate here and say that forcing you to use this.myString is actually much safer than just myString. myString could be defined locally (in the method) or in the class as a private member. I sometimes think Visual Studio is a bit cavalier about this. In the sample you mention (I saw the video but it was illegible) where is myString scoped?

Prags
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jcollum
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