Eclipse Shortcut to Move to Next File

Posted Thursday, 20 August 2009 at 22:59 by Andrew Liu
Tagged: web development
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When working with Eclipse, I became a little frustrated that I had to move my mouse when I wanted to change to another file.  I'm a "vi" purist, and need to keep my fingers on the keyboard as much as possible.  So finally, I picked up the courage to scour the internet for something.  Eclipse can be quite daunting with all the permutations of keystrokes that one can achieve, and I've never been one to read the entire manual.  So, sure enough, a few searches later, I found out that you can rebind the keys to change to the next file.  In Eclipse, this is known as the "next editor".

The Eclipse default for "Next Editor" is Control-F6.  To me, this is completely illogical as F6 is not within the range of your fingers.  I have to stop, find F6, press it, then reestablish my home keys again, whenever I have to press a function key.  So lets get this changed to something more appropriate.

Pressing Control-Shift-L once brings up a summary of key bindings.  Pressing Control-Shift-L a second time will bring up the key bindings preferences.

From here, search for the command called "Next Editor". In the bottom left hand section under "Binding", simply replace this with your new key binding of your preference.  My personal favourite is to use Control-Tab.  Be sure to also change the bindings for "Previous Editor", and use Control-Shift-Tab for this.

Apply these changes, and now you can navigate your files, or "editors" much more easily!

Source: This article from Jeffrey BigHam

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