Upgrading IDE (Eclipse in this case) is not something you do on daily basis. What is more, I use Eclipse more and more seldomly - mostly for trainings. That’s why I tend to forget which plugins I actually use (until I’m missing them and need to remind myself how were they called). As this happened to my just recently (again) I decided to write this post with a list of plugins I find useful (so that I’ll be able to come back during next upgrade…​ someday)

Baseline

I recently started with Spring Tool Suite as my baseline. Not that I’m a Spring fan-boy. I rather consider myself from both churches: Spring and JavaEE; using both stacks as a set of tools to use in an appropriate context.

I started with STS cause I find it nearly feature complete. It comes with Git, Maven plugins so that I don’t have to wonder about basics.

Fiddling with the font size

One of my most important usecases for Eclipse is during delivering a training (Eclipse is my primary IDE then). Hence, an ability to increase the font size is a must. I’m quite found of using tarlog-plugins - a set of small, but useful, features to Eclipse that are develop for personal Tarlog’s needs.

While there are some other font size plugins like eclipse-fonts, tarlog-plugins just works with every file type (not just text-files)

Migrating workspace settings

Again, due to trainings, I quite often setup a new workspace. And migrating settings from one workspace to other is a real pain in the neck. Workspace Mechanic is something that makes this process really easy.

The Workspace Mechanic automates maintenance of your Eclipse environment by tweaking preferences, adding extension locations, and so on.

And this really saves my day!

Constant test status preview

Trainings again. Whenever I run a refactoring or TDD session this is a life saver. Being able to constantly view the status of tests - brilliant.

Infinitest is a Continuous Testing plugin for Eclipse and IntelliJ. Each time a change is made on the source code, Infinitest runs all the tests that might fail because of these changes.

Grab Infinitest while it’s hot.

JBoss Tools

This is quite simple, I’m not using it beyond managing JBoss application servers. Just to be able to showcase some code on different servers that TomEE (which I usually use - try to stay "vendor agnostic").