While my initial look at Eclipse a few months ago was a bit disappointing, I gave it a second try a short while ago. Fortunately, it turns out to be much easier than originally thought, Eclipse is really pretty accessible once you know the important keyboard shortcuts.
Most of the currently visible problems seem to be focus related, read this article if you are a Eclipse Dev and want to get an insight into what you could fix to make it even better!
Here is a list of the shortcuts I found very valuable as a blind eclipse user:
- Alt+Shift+Q P: Jumps to "Package explorer", very useful if you want to navigate to an editor window showing a particular class.
- Alt+Shift+X J: Run your application.
- Alt+Shift+Q X: Shows the Problems view. You invoke this after building and/or running your app. The view contains a Tree of errors and warnings, expand the collapsed items to see the actual erorrs/warnings. Hitting return/enter on a error/warning jumps to the location in an editor window and highlights the problematic problematic expression (see next item)..
- Ctrl+1: Quick Fix. If a problematic expression was highlighted this gives you a list of things you can automatically do about it to fix it. Once you press Ctrl+1 this window doesn't have focus, so you need to hit TAB once immediately after Ctrl+1 to see the choices. Select one by hitting return and the magic takes place.
- Ctrl+SPACE: Complete a method while typing. This has the same problem as quick fix, the popup window doesn't get focus automatically, just hit TAB to get around this problem.
- Alt+Shift+Q C: Go to console output window. I usually do this after running my app to check if there was any unexpected output.
- Ctrl+F6: Switch to next editor window. Sometimes, Eclipse looses focus and you end up in nowhere land. Either F10 followed by escape or Ctrl+F6 helps a lot here.