Debugging in Eclipse

For anyone coming from the welcoming arms of Visual Studio 2015 and higher, Eclipse feels like an abomination. However, knowing some nice tips and tricks helps a lot. I want to give a shout out to this article: Again! – 10 Tips on Java Debugging with Eclipse which is much more detailed that what I am going to write here and from where I got inspired.

Three things I thought most important, though, and this is what I am going to highlight:

1. Show Logical Structure - who would have known that a little setting on top of the Expressions view would have been that important? Remember when you cursed how Maps are shown in the Eclipse debugger? With Show Logical Structures you can actually see items, keys and values!
2. The Display View - just go to Window → Show View → Display and you get something that functions a bit like the Immediate Window in Visual Studio. In other words, just write your code there and execute it in the program's context. For a very useful example: write new java.util.Scanner(request.getEntity().getContent()).useDelimiter("\\A").next() in the Display window, select it, then click on Display Result of Evaluated Selected Text, and it will add to the Display window the string of the content of a HttpPost request.
3. Watchpoints - you can set breakpoints that go into debug mode when a variable is accessed or changed!

For details and extra info, read the codecentric article I mentioned above.