It is Easter time, and here is my Easter Gift in eclipse: Quick Access. If you are one of those developers who hate the mouse and want to do everything with your hands on the keyboard: this is definitely something for you. I admit that I had not noticed that feature, as it is buried behind menus. It is such a great functionality in eclipse (thanks for the hint, Teo!), but easily gets missed.
The eclipse based CodeWarrior for MCU10.2 comes with many unique extensions of the eclipse platform, implemented by Freescale. One of these featured mentioned in my post is the ability to inspect the registers in an offline mode: The Offline Register view. How is this different from the Registers view?
Eclipse is good, but like any other tool: it gets better after I have it customized for my special needs. Eclipse stores a lot of settings in the workspace, see my article about Copy my workspace settings. But is there a way to apply some settings to every workspace? At least to the new ones? Because importing/exporting the settings can get really tedious as I have many workspace. And indeed, there are global settings in eclipse. And I want to have them changed…
Ranked as number 3 on my list of eclipse plugins is something I missed in eclipse, but what I heavily use in Microsoft Visual Studio: The ability to search files anywhere on my computer. As outlined in Compare and Merge with Eclipse, eclipse is very workspace focused: I can only search files which are inside my workspace. Well, unless I use the System Search and Desktop Search plugins. They are not one of the usual plugins. Here is what you can get (or search) …
Sometimes I have to abandon a workspace, especially if I’m using too many (see my previous post how many I have right now). But the workspace still shows up in the recent workspace list, even if the directory has been deleted. How can I get rid of an unwanted workspace? As always, there is a setting for this…
I just counted the number of active eclipse workspace I have: Eight! I’m sure there are other developers which even have more than eight? Eclipse maintains many settings inside the workspace .metadata folder (see my post on CodeWarrior Tool Tip #1: Improve performance by cleaning house in the Eclipse workspace). The question is: how can I copy or transfer my carefully balanced workspace settings to another workspace?
And here is number 4 of my ‘best of’ eclipse plugins: the Eclipse Hex Editor Plugin or EHEP. It is a great tool to inspect or change files in hex mode. Installation of the plugin is simple: Get it from the http://ehep.sourceforge.net/update site.
PC-lint from Gimpel has set the standard for static code analysis: it is used by many companies developing safety critical applications. Additionally PC-lint can check the MISRA rules which are standard for many coding guide lines. PC-lint has detected many subtle bugs in my sources. Thank you, PC-lint!
CodeWarrior classic provided a plugin for the PC-lint compiler: To bad that this does not exist in the eclipse based CodeWarrior. You might think that given PC-lint so popular, there should be an eclipse plugin available? Yes, there are many attempts on this: all of them did not work well enough for me. The good news: There is the Linticator eclipse plugin. The bad news: it is not for free.
Eclipse and CodeWarrior for MCU10 come with a wealth of functionality. But there is more out there: I can install more plugins from the eclipse market place. The possibilities are endless! Here are the five plugins I always add to my base installation, starting with rank #5: WickedShell. The plugin is installed from http://www.wickedshell.net/updatesite.
My post in “An error occurred…”: Applied Debugging Rules gives some hints about how to isolate and solve some debugging problems. But here is a case where the tips did not help: I had this dialog with “Failed to resume target process” for my HCS08 project again:
MCU on Eclipse 