Run, Forrest, run!

The first time I saw Forrest Gump I thought it was a great movie. I was particularly impressed with Tom Hanks’ portrayal of the mentally retarded Gump. Years later, I had the misfortune of watching The Terminal in which Hanks revises his Gump role, this time as a mentally retarded traveller/interior decorator who gets stuck in an airport due to a quirk of international law. Only, in this airport, they don’t taser you if you can’t just calm down and speak english within 30 seconds. Where am I going with this? I don’t know. This whole tasering situation has got me really upset.

Back to the tips… When you’ve got a file open that is “runnable”, you can hit the run  or debug  icons in the toolbar and Eclipse will launch it in whatever way is most appropriate, i.e. as a java application (if it has a main method) or as a JUnit test (if it has tests defined in it), etc. And if Eclipse can’t figure it out because there are multiple ways the file could be run, it’ll prompt you. And if the file is not runnable in any commonsense way, Eclipse will re-run the last thing you ran. But wait, there’s more! You can avoid the laborious mouse-click by using the F11 or Ctrl-F11 keystrokes to debug or run. Now, how much would you expect to pay for all this functionality? $100? $50? For the low-low price of Free, it can be yours if you call right now.

Today’s tips:

F11: debug

Ctrl-F11: run