Can you provide a link to a guide going over some techniques for using Eclipse to its potential? My inability to rapidly navigate large code bases using Eclipse is one of the reasons I dislike using it so much - I usually end up grepping in iTerm instead of trying to use Eclipse to search.
Call hierarchy (Ctrl-Meta-H?) is fantastic; it works on everything, not just on methods. Press it on an object's field finds all methods accessing it, and all methods calling those methods, etc. You can expand the tree at will and jump around the code. It's smart enough to deal with anonymous classes definition and access. I think it's hard to overstate how useful this is. Find references (Ctrl-Shift-G?) I hardly use anymore because call hierarchy is basically a functional superset, but it's also fantastic.
Class hierarchy is hardly exotic, but it's still useful.
Ctrl+click/F3 jumps to declarations (and implementations for interface methods). Also hardly exotic, but you simply use it all the time in lieu of more regular navigation. On a sidenote: while debugging, ctrl-shift-click runs the paused program until it steps into the selected call, moving the editor to the line.
Within files, usages of the variable/type/exception are highlighted, and you can jump between the positions using the keyboard. They are also highlighted in the scroll bar, so you can immediately see if this field is used just once or twice, or everywhere. Also within files, Ctrl-O opens the file's outline, letting you jump to methods, types and fields using the keyboard.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some and there are other tools I don't know/appreciate yet. The only time I use grep in the Java projects I'm working on is when I need to deal with resources. In my pet javascript projects, OTOH, I use :grep constantly (feeling super clumsy all the while). I looked at the transmission code (which is C) on the weekend and I almost went insane because I had no kind of introspection/tooling initally (later on, ctags improved things somewhat).
For me i only need the following to zip through a sizeable code base with just a few key combos in eclipse:
* F3 - go to definition of thing under cursor
* ctrl+g - search for all usages of thing under cursor (used sparingly, too slow)
* ctrl-shift-t - find & open type
* ctrl-shift-r - find & open resource (these 2 should be merged!)
* ctrl-e + start typing the name of an open window to switch to it
* ctrl+shift+F4 i'm in too deep, close all open editors
* ctrl+/ fold all methods, i never warmed to ctrl+o or F4 for an overview of the code in a module / class
I have a couple of non standard bindings i set for things like show me the version control log for this file.
It all falls apart when you want to navigate within an editor a-la vim motions.