Ask HN: Awesome/neat/favourite Eclipse techniques?

Hi everyone,

I'm the n00b that posted this question a while back ("Reasonable Java editor for heavily CLI-oriented UNIX types who hate bloat?"): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597213

Well, your responses - especially the ones that were most convicted about how futile it is to write Java without Eclipse (or at least, one of the big three IDEs) - convinced me to give it another go.

Sure enough, I upgraded all my hardware to relatively contemporary 64-bit gear, stocked up on some additional gigabytes of RAM, and now I'm happily writing all my Java in Eclipse. You were right.

I'm getting the sense, however, that despite my curiosity and occasional perusal of the documentation, I'm probably not taking advantage of some of the neatest things you can do with it.

About 90% of the time, I'm using it the same way I used to edit Java in a text editor. Oh, sure, the highlighting is nice, and I often use the package hierarchical view to navigate to classes or methods -- handy. The auto-indentation, cleanup, templates for common phenomena (try/catch, etc.), assistance in adding imports for unresolved class names, and other little things are all helpful. As some of you pointed out, the refactoring stuff can be pretty good; doing a mass-rename of a method with one click sure beats doing it by hand, or with a one-liner in the shell.

Still, I don't feel like I'm getting that much use out of it compared to just writing the code in a shell. My intuition tells me I should be doing more. If you have any tricks you find exceptionally useful or other productivity hacks that are less than entirely obvious, I'd love to know about them.

Thanks in advance!