Groovy 1.5 ist out. It’s grooviest thing on earth. Far beyond the Grandfather of Funk himself, if you believe to the rumours and the ‘press’. Wow! It’s sooo groooovy and you really feel groovy if you’re elected to work with it.

I had some looks at groovy again and again since years. In theory it’s cool and I have many ideas where to use it. I developed some really groovy things in the past two weeks and I wanted to report about them here. But I only feel groovy when thinking about groovy. In theory.

Pratically I hate groovy, because I spend to much time on it, trying to run stupid unit tests in eclipse. The Eclipse Groovy plugin is shockingly terrible. At least it does not even compile my Groovy classes. Argh! Renaming a package which is used in a Groovy class crashes the whole IDE. Much wasted time.

Yes, groovy could be groovy, if there were a reasenable tooling we can use. (I have to stick with Eclipse.)

I hope I can report something positive soon.

Martin has posted a nice entry in his blog “programming kung fu” about eclipse hot keys.

I think the most important key is ctrl-shift-L which gives you a list of all shortcuts. A shortcut I often can not remember, when I am searching for a specific one. So it is also one used very rarley.

Beyond the common ctrl-C/X/V/S/W and the ones mentioned in the article or the comments, the shortcuts I use most are the following:

alt-up/down - For moving the actual line / all marked lines up / down one line.

alt-shift-up/down - Duplicate the actual line / all marked. This one is very cool in combination with the one above, when hacking configuration with many similar keys.

ctrl-D - For deleting the actual line. Very useful when you have used the two above too much.