Eclipse and the conflicting shortcut problem
I moved all development activities to linux recently. Part of the migration process involved getting used to some new apps like Kopete / Pidgin / KDE Snapshot etc. It was a breeze until I started debugging my code in eclipse.
I frequently use the eclipse keyboard shortcuts to cut down the time I spend coding / debugging. One of my favorite is Ctrl + Shift + i , which will open up the inspection box for a particular variable. This shortcut just did not work. For quite a few days I did not understand why. The other shortcuts like fix imports ( ctrl + shift + o ) seemed to be working fine. That’s when I stumbled across a kopete shortcut.
The shortcut Ctrl + Shift + i was also used by kopete to read messages. According to the documentation this was a global short cut that was valid in any KDE application. I closed kopete just to confirm that it was contributing to the problem and voila, Ctrl + Shift + i started to work inside eclipse once again. So the next time a shortcut does not work in eclipse you might want to
- Look at the Wondow -> Preferences -> Keys and ensure that the key is bound.
- If it is bound, check other applications and make sure this is not a global shortcut used elsewhere.
- If it is a global shortcut, change the key binding in eclipse or the other application.
- Relax