Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Improved search capabilities on Eclipse (LiClipse 2.2.0)

LiClipse 2.2.0 (just released) introduces improved search capabilities for Eclipse.

This is done by leveraging Lucene for indexing the files searched -- it's interesting to note that the index is built (and checked for consistency) on-the-fly when a text search is requested, which means that the indexing won't add any overhead on the build process (although that means that the first time some scope is searched it may take a bit more time to build the indexes -- but still comparable to a regular text search on Eclipse -- and subsequent calls are nearly instant).

The image below shows the search dialog (activated through Ctrl + H), where it's possible to select what/where to search. The path(s) and project(s) are updated when a search is requested based on the current selection.


The search results page also offers additional flexibility, which allows grouping the matches in different ways -- they can be flattened, grouped by project, folder or files -- and filtering the results based on the paths (multiple terms may be comma-separated and "!" can be used in the beginning of the term to exclude matches).


Also, this release adds support out of the box for Linux Shell files, Windows bat files, PERL and Swift (through TextMate bundles), so, 27 languages are available out of the box now (View supported languages).