Eclipse Cookbook

3.19. Customizing Code Assist

Problem

Code assist is great, but some of its features don’t fit your coding style.

Solution

Customize code assist by selecting Window→ Preferences→ Java→ Code Formatter.

Discussion

One common issue with code assist is that it puts curly braces on the same line as other code.

               
                   public void display( ) {

    System.out.println("No problem.");
}

Some programmers, however, prefer that curly braces appear on separate lines:

public void display( ) 

                   {

    System.out.println("No problem.");
}

You can customize the location of curly braces by selecting Window→ Preferences→ Java→ Code Formatter, as shown in Figure 3-21. Here, check the “Insert a new line before an opening brace” checkbox, as shown in the figure; the sample code below will change to match.

Figure 3-21. Customizing code assist

You also can create new code assist items in Eclipse. Say you want to create a shortcut to print the current date. To do that, select Window→ Preferences→ Java→ Editor→ Templates. In this case, we’re going to create a new shortcut named datem to print the date, as shown in Figure 3-22. We’ll use the code:

System.out.println("${date}");

to print the date.

Tip

Besides ${date}, you can use other terms, such as ${cursor}, which indicates where to position the cursor after the insertion has been performed. When you type ${ in the New Template dialog, code assist displays the possible values you can use ...