wtorek, 18 maja 2010

Boolmarks in Eclipse

This post is a credit of how shitty is the bookmarking functionality in Eclipse.
For the first, lets introduce the way bookmarking works there.
There are multiple ways of setting a bookmark:

Way 1: In the menu click Edit/Add Bookmark. Type something in the window that pops up. Click OK in it.
Way 2: Press ALT+E+K (a shortcut to the above). Type something in the window that pops up. Click OK in it.
Way 3: Right click on the strap to the left of where line numbers are present in the editor window (If you do not have line numbers, shame on you. In this case go to Window/Preferences/General/Editors/Text Editors and check "Show line numbers"). Choose Add bookmark from the drop down list. Type something in the window that pops up. Click OK in it.

Of course, as you might imagine, the whole reason why this functionality is shitty is the "Type something..." part in the above ways. This makes it completely unusable, since placing the bookmark is hardly worth the time and distraction spent on typing something and clicking OK in the pop-up. For example, when I'm coding, I want to bookmark 5 places where I need to make a modification, then jump to each, one by one, and make a modification.

It seems that the eclipse developers use bookmarks to jump to globally crucial places in whole projects. For those it may make sense to have names, since it is then easier to locate them from special place in the editor. The best reason for me to use bookmarks is to navigate in a single file.

For this reason I would like to introduce a naming convention: "global bookmarks" for the kind of thing implemented in Eclipse and "local bookmark" for the kind of thing I want to use (present e.g. in Code::Blocks, Borland and Visual Studio).
According to this naming convention, local bookmarks are missing from Eclipse. No more self-delusion, Eclipse developers!
This is something that definitely should be fixed. For the completeness of this post, I must mention that there is a bookmarks plugin at etc.to website, but its seems to be only for the Java version of Eclipse.