July 14, 2004
Eclipse: Mark Occurrences

My favorite feature of the new Eclipse release, by far, is something that isn't turned on by default, and took me a long time to discover: Mark Occurrences. This is just so useful...

Give it a bash, if you haven't already; it's great! Basically, it highlights whichever element your cursor is on. This element is highlighted throughout the Java editor, both in the edit area and in the right-hand margin where errors and warnings are shown. (What is that called, by the way?)

And there's more. Put your cursor over a method's return type, and it'll highlight all the method's exit points. Put it over an exception in a method's throws clause, and it'll show you all the places in your method where that exception can be thrown.

Posted to Java by Simon Brunning at July 14, 2004 02:17 PM
Comments

Gamma actually demonstrated this at JavaOne and the audience just gasped! I think that more than appreciating the implementation, they were paying respect to what a great idea this is.

Posted by: Dan Allen on July 14, 2004 05:55 PM

Yes, this is a truly wonderful new feature.

However, it's only really documented in the Help system under:

The Java Development User Guide -> Reference -> What's New.

i.e. that's the page: help/topic/org.eclipse.jdt.doc.user/whatsNew/jdt_whatsnew.html

Posted by: George Latkiewicz on July 16, 2004 02:02 AM

Great feature indeed. I use it all the time in Intellij IDEA which has had this since 17 February when version 4.0 was released and since 15 May 2003 in their "early access program":-)

Posted by: Bas Leijdekkers on July 16, 2004 10:51 AM

Yeah. Great to see Eclipse coming up with this new innovative feature that's been part of Idea for some time now.

Posted by: Glen Stampoultzis on July 19, 2004 03:30 AM

ac8RDX

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