Making the Home and End Keys work in Eclipse 3.4 on Apple Mac OSX
Hidden in the comments of the article of Starry Hope - Mac Home and End Keys are some instructions for how to make the home and end keys work well as begin and end line in eclipse. I've done all the other tricks to make this work on my Mac, so was getting really frustrated with Eclipse. double home and double end are common key combinations for me in IntelliJ and Eclipse on Windows, so the current behaviour of going to the beginning or end of the file drives me crazy. The details of doing this differ slightly in Eclipse 3.4.1, so I'll list the steps I followed below.
- open the eclipse preferences pane
- general->keys
- in the filter type line start and note that there will be existing bindings when editing text.
- select line start type home, and ensure that the "when" field stays with Editing Text
- apply
- follow this process for select line start, line end, and select line end.
After doing this, expect your anger at eclipse on Mac to decrease to much more manageable levels.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Or you just do what the rest of us do and get used to mac keyboard shortcuts (assuming those work in eclipse)
command+left and command+right are the equivalent of home/end, I believe. Maybe it was option+up and option+down.
It does take a few seconds to reorient myself when I move to a windows computer, but using a mac keyboard without home/end buttons has made it much easier to train myself that they aren’t actually necessary
June 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
sure — but making it work right matches my dumb brain. I can only go so far with this and home and end were dumb.
In every IDE I use home and end, so having them do what I expect is so much nicer
June 12th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
For the record it’s command-left and command-right. Command-up and Command-down are equivalent to home and end.
Entourage drives me nuts by using the Windows meanings of home and end and making command-left/right move a word at a time. I don’t really care which system is in use as long as everything is consistent…
June 30th, 2009 at 3:01 am
i use the home and end keys all the time when writing code, i can imagine how frustrating this can be…even on my vaio i need to use the fn key to get home,end which is a pain at times
December 9th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Thank you thank you thank you! This was driving me crazy