Nerdy Lifestyle Changes: Look How Cool My Eclipse Looks!
We all know that I’m a pretty big nerd. Really, I’m proud of it. That being said, I thought it was time I finally customized my eclipse to look the way I wanted it to!So I went out and found an article discussing how to use preset color themes, and went about using the Vibrant Ink preset from that webpage. I really liked it, but I noticed certain problems with reference highlighting, so I made some further changes.
You can get my presets here: Vibrant Ink Modified.
You may recognize Vibrant Ink from TextMate for mac.
I’ve also recently been learning about some of the trends in industry development, since I’m going to be interning at NextJump this summer.
I’ve taken up Test-Driven-Development, so I wanted my eclipse to reflect the focus on testing. You’ll notice two code views in my eclipse displayed at all times. I reserve the right view for test-code only and the left view for whatever other code I’d like. I enforce a strict 80-character width limit, to ensure that I don’t ever have to side-scroll.
The 80-character width limit was something I always considered a vestige from days of old, but the ability to have two classes on the screen at once provides a real reason to abide. Eclipse has a preference built-in to provide a width-limit line for reference.
I probably could have gone wider, but I’ve also noticed that it stops me from the bad habit of over-nesting. Anytime I find myself wrapping too many lines, I know it’s time to either change what I’m doing, or abstract it out, which inevitably makes my code more readable.
I’m still a tabs, not spaces guy, but I’ve changed the display for tabs to the 2-space equivalent, because I think it makes my code look better.