An alternative would be to click the "Show View as a fast view" icon in the lower left hand corner of the Eclipse window and choose "Help".  When the Help view pops up, make sure "Related Topics" is selected.  To hide a fast view, simply click anywhere outside of it.  Now, if you click on or select a class, property or method and then click the Help fast view - it will display a list of help topics that are related to your selection.  This approach may not be as quick or graceful as Shift+F2, but the advantage is that it offers links to related articles in addition to the regular as docs.

See it in action:

Please keep in mind that these techniques will only give you the official Adobe documentation.  Your docs, and 3rd party library docs will not show up in the help view.

If anyone has any other fancy tricks, let us know in the comments.

The problem: You or a team member exported a Flex project archive, and now you want to import it back into your workspace but you are receiving the following message -  A project with the same name already exists in your workspace. Rename or delete the existing project. It's nice of Eclipse not to allow you to overwrite an existing project, but an option to import it with a different project name would be nice.

The solution: Unzip your Flex project archive.  Open up the file called .project in a text editor (e.g. notepad).  Under <projectDescription> there should be an element called <name>.  Change this value to something unique within your workspace (appending a "2" usually does the trick).  Open Flex Builder and import the modified project.

Anyone know of a more automated solution?

Shortcuts:

1. Go to Definition:  Ctrl+Click on function name or variable to go to it's definition.
2. Auto Complete:  Ctrl+Space will bring up that handy list of auto-completion options.
3. Ctrl+/:  Comments or uncomments the selected line(s).
4. Ctrl+Shift+C:  Adds or removes block comment to selection.
5. Quick Outline:  Press Ctrl+O when editing an .as or .mxml file to get a list of class variables and functions.  You can type a few characters to filter the list, and when you select one, the editor will jump to the definition.  This is way faster than using the outline window or Ctrl+F to search for something.
6. Ctrl+Shift+T:  Browse all class types, select one to view the class definition.
7. Alt+Down & Alt+Up:  Moves the selected line(s) up or down.  This is great for re-ordering variable declarations, mxml attributes, etc.
8. Ctrl+Alt+Down & Ctrl+Alt+Up:  Copies the selected line(s) and pastes them above or below.  Combines 3 steps (select, copy, paste) into one!
9. Alt+Left & Alt+Right:  Work like your browser's back and forward buttons for your navigation history.  This is especially useful when you are control-clicking or "quick-outlining" to function or variable definitions.

Other Savory Tips:

1. To create a series of nested folders in the project navigator, open the new->folder dialog and enter a path (e.g. com/rphelan/controls).  Eclipse will automatically create all folders in the path if they don't already exist.  This is very useful when first creating a project.
2. You can double-click to maximize/restore any panel in Eclipse.  I frequently expand my editor window to show the maximum amount of code possible.  (Note:  this does not legitimize writing super long lines of code.  I recommend wrapping at around 80 characters)

If several of these are new to you, try out just one or two at a time and see how you like them. Once they are second nature, try adding a few more. My theory is that the less I have to rely on my mouse when developing the better.

Want to learn more? Don't forget that you can bring up a list of relevant shortcut key options at any time by pressing Ctrl+Shift+L.

Note: Mac users - just swap out the command key for control in each of these combos.

AnyEdit Tools

Adds a bunch of useful tools into the right-click context menu, in a submenu called "Convert". My personal favorites are the "Convert -> Leading tabs to spaces" and "Convert -> Leading spaces to tabs". I know that the Flex Coding Conventions tell you not to use tabs, but I prefer tabs to spaces in my own code because it keeps everything nicely formatted and easy to maintain. If I need to say, paste some code into a blog entry, I use the AnyEdit tools to convert those tabs back to spaces so that it displays correctly. I also frequently copy and paste bits of code found on websites, the user documentation, etc. into my source, and want to convert those tabs back to spaces. Huge time saver!

• Convert -> Camel <-> Underscores
• Convert -> Leading tabs to spaces
• Convert -> Leading spaces to tabs
• Convert -> Chars to html entities
• Convert -> Html entities to chars
• Convert -> To / From Unicode notation
• Convert -> To / From Base64

RegEx Editor

This is a "View" that you can add to your perspective via Window -> Show View -> Other -> Regex Util. You can enter a regular expression and a string to test against. It supports syntax highlighting and has very useful tooltips for characters that are part of regular expression syntax.

Mylyn

I'm experimenting with using this at work to connect to our JIRA repository. (You could use it to connect to Adobe's bug tracking system too). Also works for Bugzilla, Trac, and possibly others. Its cool that it pops up a message right in Eclipse whenever a new task is assigned to you, and also that you can tightly integrate it into your regular workflow. The downside is that it seems to be lacking some of the basic features that the web interface has which (because of our system's configuration) prevents me from being able to create new tasks. Maybe I just need to wait another version or two?

Heap Status

I wrote a separate blog post about this a while back, its cool to be able to get a glimpse of how the VM is managing your memory.

Keep Resident

Uses some Windows hooks to try and keep Eclipse in memory as much as possible. Use this if you are experiencing frequent "hang-ups" with your IDE.

The performance of Eclipse (and other large Java applications) has long suffered due to the Windows virtual memory manager. Windows has a tendency to preemptively swap Java processes out of physical memory, even when there is still plenty of physical memory available. This interacts very poorly with Java processes, which do not have good locality and touch a lot of memory. The problem is exacerbated when Java performs garbage collection, which causes the Java process to touch lots of memory that has been paged out to disk. Ever had Eclipse randomly hang for 15-20 seconds? This is most likely the culprit.

Here's what I had to do to get Cairngen running on OSX 10.4 / Eclipse 3.3.2. I'm assuming it would work for 10.5 too, but I haven't tested it.

1. Download the following jars:
   • Mozilla Rhino (js.jar)
   • Jakarta BSF (bsf.jar)
   • Apache Commons Logging (commons-logging-1.1.1.jar)
2. I placed the jars in the Ant lib folder in my Eclipse installation: eclipse/plugins/org.apache.ant_1.7.0.../lib
3. Go to Eclipse->Preferences->Ant->Runtime->Classpath, select "Ant Home Entries" and add the three jars using the "Add External JARs..." button.

That's it. Hope you don't have to waste as much time figuring this out as I did!

My coworker Axel discovered a nice Eclipse trick the other day. If you go to Window->Preferences->General, there is an option called "Show heap status" (if you don't see it, check out my note at the end of this post). This option is disabled by default. When it is selected, you will notice a bar in the lower right hand corner of the screen indicating Eclipse's current memory usage. If you right-click this bar, there is another option to show the max heap size. Good stuff. The best part is the little trash can button which you can use to force garbage collection to be run. After running Eclipse for a while, this often has a big effect on the memory usage, and runs surprisingly fast on my machine (less than one second).

Overriding the default memory allocation:
After watching the heap's behavior for a day or two I noticed that the start size of the heap (a paltry 64MB) seems to be insufficient for compiling any of my Flex projects. When you do a compile, you will see Java incrementally increase the size of the heap to accommodate. Since there is some overhead in memory allocation, we can optimize this a bit by telling Java how much memory to allocate to the virtual machine when it starts up. You do this by setting the -vmargs flag at the command line.

Try running Eclipse using -vmargs -Xms256M -Xmx512M to set the start heap size at 256mb and max at 512mb (I think the default max is around 256). Take care not to set either of these too high, or it will bog down the rest of your machine... and make sure you have enough memory installed to begin with. I've got 2GB of RAM and I'm not running any other heavy applications alongside Eclipse, so allocating a few hundred extra megs shouldn't be an issue for me.

In Windows, you can set these values using a shortcut. Right click your shortcut to Eclipse and select "Properties". Add the flags after the existing Target (and outside of the quotes). It should look something like this:

"C:\Program Files\eclipse\eclipse.exe" -vmargs -Xms256M -Xmx512M

Memory usage at startup...

Before:

After:

I don't have any definitive proof that this makes any difference on compiler performance, and results will always vary from one machine to the next, but its a pretty easy trick and has worked great for me so far.

Note:
If you do not see the "Show heap status" option in your preferences (and I don't think you will if you have the standalone version of Flex Builder), you will just have to obtain the plugin manually.

From the Eclipse site:

The Heap Status plug-in shows the current Java heap usage in the status line (total heap and amount used). A button allows you to force a garbage collect. It includes a preference page (Window > Preferences > Workbench > Memory Indicator) which lets you turn it on and off. This plug-in works on Eclipse 2.1, 3.0, 3.0.1 and 3.1.

The Heap Status plug-in can be obtained via the Platform UI team's update site.
Use Help > Software Updates > Find and Install > Search for new features to install > New Remote Site, and give the following as the URL.
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-ui-home/updates

When prompted, choose Yes to restart.

If you don't see the status indicator in the status line, or if the preference page is missing, restart eclipse with the -clean command line option.