Eclipse and Code Completion, a gentle showcase
The Eclipse IDE has made lots of progress recently, and the Eclipse Mars release is a clear improvement compared to the earlier releases.
Still, the Java code completion experience is far from perfect when compared to IntelliJ IDEA and Netbeans.
Let’s take a dummy sample:
Type List then Ctrl+Space and the first completion is java.awt.List. I can understand that alphabetical sort yields this result, but other IDEs pounder orders in a more sensible way.
Nevermind, I keep going on and try to complete once more:
Here IntelliJ would have offered me a completion for possible matches. I would have chosen ArrayList by typing, and the imports would have been fixed for me. It’s not the case with Eclipse, so let’s go ahead and try using the quick fix:
No luck, Eclipse still wants me in AWT. I went into the obvious fix: I told Eclipse I wanted a java.util.List.
Cool, so perhaps I can now have a proper right hand side completion?
Oh no, Eclipse wants me to type more, or roll on and write my own list implementation :-)
