I love Eclipse. It’s my favorite IDE, but for me it has two big missing features:
- A resource bundle editor.
- A good visual editor. Sorry, Eclipse VEP is not as good as Matisse.
I’m going to talk about the first missing features. Eclipse comes with a properties editor, but not a resource bundle editor. You can’t see easily if you have missed or misspelled any key. You don’t event have an outline view. I love to use Ctrl+O to search methods, fields and classes in Java files. Why don’t be able to use Ctrl+O to find quickly a key in a properties file?
Well, fortunately Eclipse has a huge community and lots of plugin contributors. I use this plugin that has interesting features.
- It shows the property keys as a list or as a tree (splitting property keys based on the dot character).
- It shows all the available locales at the same time.
- If founds missed keys in any locale and displays a warning icon.
- It saves the keys grouped, in alphabetical order and with the equal signs aligned.
- It escapes Unicode characters that are not inside the ASCII subset. Example: “C\u00F3digo postal” for “Código postal”.
- It founds duplicate property values.
Example properties file:
address.city = City address.postalCode = Postal code address.street = Street contact.firstName = First name contact.lastName = Last name
On balance it’s a simple but useful plugin. Definitely a must-have plugin for Eclipse.
