Uses of Breadcrumbs in Eclipse

   


Eclipse has the breadcrumb feature for a while. It is immensely useful. One can turn it off or on by pressing Alt-Shift-B. It's main purpose is, of course, easy navigation. It makes it easy to navigate to different packages, classes or project without opening the package explorer view which takes up valuable space. But that is not the only use. Other uses are :

1. Quickly go to the beginning of a class. If you are in the middle of a long class and you want to go to the beginning of the class. To do this, just type Alt-Shift-B and which will put the focus on the breadcrumb and use the left arrow key to highlight the class names and hit enter.
2. Quickly go to other methods in a class. If you are in the middle of long class which has many methods and you want to go to some other method. One way to do it will be to use Ctrl-Shift-Up/Down which will take you to the next of previous method. One can also use Ctrl-O which will show all the methods. Yet another way is to type Alt-Shift-B and use the up/down arrow key to go to the desired method.
3. Quickly delete a method or the whole class. Before there was breadcrumb one had to go to the package explorer view or the outline view. Not anymore. One can just go to the breadcrumb and hit the delete key now.