eclipse import static

i very much believe in a craftsman approach to software development, which, among other things, advocates the value of mastering the tools in your toolbox.

i consider using keyboard shortcuts in your IDE of choice a part of this craftsmanship approach. i do sympathize with unclebob’s plight for mouse-less editing and with stevey’s earlier posts on the subject.

back in 2004 java5 went GA and introduced static imports among several other syntactic niceties.

this feature is most useful for static helper methods – instead of writing Assert.assertEquals, i would rather use assertEquals, since i know i am writing a test, and in the domain of testing, assertEquals does not need to be qualified. same goes for many internal utility methods that i tend to use a lot (e.g. asList()) or static factory methods (e.g. newDateTime()). as a side note, using newXY() as a static factory method as opposed to create() makes it more suitable for static importing.

in my current IDE (Eclipse) i rely on auto-completion Ctrl+1 programming, so i would start typing Assert., followed by Ctrl+Space and then manually convert normal import to import static. it was very undignified.

it turns out that in Eclipse Ctrl+Shift+M that i already used to import dependencies under the cursor, also works for converting static method calls into static imports.

now all i have to do is type Assert.assertEquals once, then press Ctrl+Shift+M (obsessively followed by Ctrl+Shift+O to organize imports), and i can start using assertEquals all over the place without qualifying it with Assert.

as an additional convenience, i always set Number of static imports needed for .* to 1 under Java -> Code Style -> Organize Imports in Eclipse preferences. this way a single static import of a method from Assert triggers import static of Assert.*, which is what i want.