Introduction

I recently came across a nice collection of coding standards that the developers at Gallery2.org are using. I especially liked the summary of settings for Eclipse PDT. I applied them to my Eclipse PDT development environment, took some screenshots and put this article together for my personal reference:

Eclipse PDT editor settings

Here is the list of common editor settings that promote readable source code:

Note: The following screenshots and settings apply to Eclipse Galileo (Build id: 20090920-1017).

General text editor settings

Go to Window/Preferences/General/Editors/Text Editors and verify the following settings:

1. Displayed tab width = 2
2. Insert spaces for tabs should be checked
3. Show print margin should be checked
4. Print margin column = 100

Figure 1: General Text Editor settings

PHP style format settings

Go to Window/Preferences/PHP/Code Style/Formatter and verify the following settings:

1. Tab policy = Spaces
2. Indentation Size = 2

Figure 2: PHP Code Style Formatter settings

Source control integration settings

Go to Window/Preferences/Team/Ignored Resources and make sure that ".cache", ".project", ".buildpath" and ".settings" are ignored.

Figure 3: Files excluded from source control

File Save settings

Go to Window/Preferences/PHP/Editor/Save Actions and verify that:

1. Remove trailing whitespace should be checked
2. Choose All lines is selected

Figure 4: Clean-up actions when saving a file

Ausblick

Besides these editor settings there is another very powerful feature that makes it easy to follow coding standards without having to think about it. And this features is called Code Templates, which are similar to Microsoft Visual Studio code snippets. Here is a list of PHP templates that are predefined in PDT. You can modify these to meet your coding standard and you can create additional ones.

Go to Window/Preferences/PHP/Templates and you see a complete list of them:

Figure 5: Code templates help also with coding standards without the need to remember all the details