How to Make Eclipse Content Assist Work like Visual Assist

Some people like overly helpful IDEs, some just plain hate IDEs (“real programmers use vi”!). I for one am squarely in the former category. I love refactoring tools, reference searches, content assist and any other feature an IDE throws at me that help me increase my productivity. Heck I would let it write the program for me if it can churn out quality code!

I like Eclipse, but I’m a huge fan of Visual Assist style content assist. With Visual Assist, content assist pops up whenever you are typing, not just when you type “.” or “->”. But Eclipse, out of the box is configured to only popup content assist when you type “.” for Java. Luckily it’s trivial to change it so that it pops up whenever you are typing:

Simply enter all the letters in the alphabet (both simple and capital) in the “Auto activation triggers for Java:” box as shown below:


Not sure whether this is available for other languages though. You may have noticed that I have also lowered "Auto activation delay" to 0, so that it opens immediately.