Directly jump to the content and enable reader mode
Article image

have read aloud


Reading time: about 2 min Print version

Eclipse: disable smart insert

Are you using the cool and powerful Eclipse IDE?

Are you annoyed by the "smart" feature of auto closing brackets, quotes and similar?

If yes, this quick tip might help you.

I personally get very annoyed when I forgot a " somewhere, add it and it starts messing around adding extra ones, messing up my end button and so on?

Or you want to edit an exising code and the "smart" proposal popup blocks you cursors up/down and you have to press the ESC key?
It tooke me a while to find to the settings to disable it.


Sadly there is no "global disable" button yet, but there are a few places where you can disable most of it.
(Vote here to get it: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=564792)


Here are the place to disable them individually, so you don't have to spend hours to find them:
All in "Windows->Preferences":

  • Ant -> Editor -> Content Assist -> uncheck "Insert single proposals automatically"
  • C/C++ -> Editor -> Content Assists -> uncheck "Insert single proposals automatically"
    C/C++ -> Editor -> Typing -> uncheck all "Automatically close" boxes
  • Java -> Editor -> Content Assist -> uncheck "Insert single proposals automatically"
    Java -> Editor -> Typing -> uncheck all "Automatically close" boxes
  • PHP -> Editor -> Content Assist -> uncheck "Insert single proposals automatically"
    PHP -> Editor -> Typing -> uncheck all "Automatically close" boxes

So far, those are logical and where to expect.
But what did cost me a really long time is to figure out the settings for the generic text editor used for example by the wild web developer (JS, less, XML and much more)

  • TextMate -> Language Configuration -> for every item in the list pick the "Auto Closing Pair" Tab in the lower half and disable "Enable auto closing brackets"

I hope this quick tip might save you hours of frustration by "smart" features.

Thumbnail Imagebased on icon by Iurii Bucharskii under CC licence.

0 comments

Our algorithm thinks, these articles are relevant: