Getting comfortable with Eclipse

You finally have the Force.com IDE installed, but there's a few more steps you need to take. It probably doesn't look like Eclipse has changed much, so let's fix that by performing the following steps:

Eclipse is highly customizable and has a long list of settings available from the Preferences menu available in the Window menu (the Eclipse menu on Mac). Before we get underway writing code, here are a few tweaks that we recommend you follow, which will help you have a better coding experience:

In addition to these preferences, we also recommend moving the Outline view under Package Explorer. You can do so just by dragging it to the bottom half of Package Explorer. This will increase the size of the editor and make it easier to see more of your code.

If you're like us, you wouldn't like to type things over and over again. Eclipse comes with a Snippets feature that lets you save frequently used code blocks and then use them just by double-clicking on them. You can even use Merge Fields to represent variables that you specify upon use. To get started with your first Snippet, perform the following steps:

You just created your first Snippet. You can't use it just yet but go ahead and put a sticky on this page so that you can come back later and create more Snippets with useful code. In later chapters, when we are writing code, we'll use this Snippet.

Creating your first Snippet in Eclipse