It is not the least easy to switch to Eclipse after years of addiction to Intellij IDEA. IDEA is the best IDE I have worked with until now and will continue to remain that way until there is another visionary who attempts to improve the developer pleasure instead of just technical modularity. Eclipse may (or may not) have a better architecture, better design, better modularity, incomparable number of plug-ins and better written code than IDEA, but that doesn’t seem to attract the end developers like me.
I just love IDEA for the way it understands me, knows what I am trying to do at any moment and most importantly for the complete integrated development experience it gives. That doesn’t mean that Eclipse is not famous. Eclipse is very famous and many people love it too. But I think it is because it is free and more so because every other software vendor creates plug-ins for eclipse and that level of community support is not there for Netbeans or IDEA.
Anyways, recently when I had to switch to Eclipse for a few months for one particular development project, I was not a happy camper. I wanted to bring at least some level of IDEA like familiarity into Eclipse and with a happy accident I was able to get to the IDEA key scheme for Eclipse. I sincerely thank Santhosh for having created an Eclipse plug-in for that. It works as advertisied except for a very few gotchas.
To create an IDEA key scheme for your Eclipse Helios installation, download the plug-in from here. Drop the downloaded jar file into $ECLIPSE_HOME\plugins folder and restart Eclipse. Then goto Window -> Preferences -> General -> Keys and modify the scheme drop-down to change it from “Default” to “Intellij IDEA”. Click Apply and OK and you are done. Every key combination like Ctrl+N, Ctrl+Shift+N, Alt+F7, Shift+F6, Ctrl+F12, Ctrl+Shift+-, etc should work as expected.
It did not give me THE COMPLETE IDEA experience but I guess this is the best I could get for now. If anyone has any suggestions for a better IDEA experience please do share them in the comments section. I most definitely will be grateful.