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I have a quick question that might save me a few seconds of annoyance every day. I know that eclipse can do a lot of autocomplete magic, so this might be possible:

As a programmer who learned with python, I constantly forget to surround contitions in control structures (like if or while) with parentheses. How do I make eclipse autocomplete opening and closing parentheses when I finish typing while or if?

I am aware that I can autocomplete whole structures with ctrl-space, but how can I configure eclipse to do this by itself?

Any help is appreciated.

Julius Naeumann
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2 Answers2

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So in stock Eclipse, the usual way to bring up assisted content is to type Ctrl+Space. The problem with this is that it brings up both Help Proposals and Template Proposals, with the Help Proposals displayed first. You end up wasting time scrolling down to find what you actually want from the Template Proposals. And there's just that much more clutter to choose from.

The solution is this:

Go Window->Preferences->General->Keys. In the type filter text search for "Template". This should bring up a "C++ Content Assist (Template Proposal)" line. Click on it. Now map this to whatever shortcut you'd like (I did Shift+Space because that's an easy one to do while typing). Make sure to click on the "Binding" option to do this. Click "Ok" and you're done!

If you ever want to add or change what is brought up by that shortcut, and for which specific strings it works, just go Window->Preferences->C/C++->Editor->Templates and you can edit those to do exactly what you'd like when using that newly assigned shortcut.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: I am unable verify if this works for PyDev, as I'm running Eclipse Oxygen, which doesn't currently offer PyDev or the Eclipse Marketplace Client plugin. However, my guess is this would still work in PyDev. Best of luck!

Sources: Setting auto complete shortcuts in Eclipse How to change the Control+Space autocomplete shortcut keys in Eclipse for Android

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Thanks for any help, but the only thing that seems to work are workarounds. My prefered "solution" is to change the Auto activation triggers for Java in Preferences>Java>Editor>Content Assist from . to .iwfs, so that the autocomplete dialog automatically pops up when I start typing if, while, for or switch. Then hitting enter will do exactly what I needed.

Julius Naeumann
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