Friday 8 July 2011

Some "Must-Have" general plugins for Eclipse

As a fairly new Eclipse user, primarily focusing on C/C++ development, besides the Eclipse CDT plugin, I found that there are a couple of plugins which I would recommend to anyone using Eclipse:
  • AnyEdit (http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/)- AnyEdit is a "swiss army knife" for all Eclipse editors, where it adds several new tools to the context menu of text- based Eclipse editors, to output consoles, to Eclipse main menu and editor toolbar
  • StartExplorer (http://startexplorer.sourceforge.net/) - offers a convenient integration of the Windows Explorer, the Windows command line, Windows default system applications and the clipboard into Eclipse

Both these plugins can be found on the Marketplace in Eclipse. So, if you require "express" setup, it does not require manual downloading and installation of the packages.

AnyEdit features
- tabs <-> spaces convertion on multiple files or entire directories and supports also file exclusion filter for tabs <-> spaces action
- automatically remove trailing whitespaces and/or perform tabs<->spaces conversion on a "save" action
- automatically create a new line at the end of the file if the last line was not terminated by new line (useful for Linux development)
- adds "Save All", "Open File" and "Show whitespace in editor" buttons to the global Eclipse toolbar
- adds "Open File", "Open Type" and "Save to file..." actions to supported output consoles and "Save to file..." toolbar button to the Console view

StartExplorer features
It adds a context menu with the following operations:
- Show resource(s) in Windows Explorer
- Start this (these) file(s) with system editor
- Start cmd.exe here
- Copy resource path to clipboard
- Custom Commands