As an Eclipse IDE user, you might have come across method invocations where the meaning of the passed parameters is not obvious:

Code Minings disabled

When confronting IntelliJ users with this, they will ask you: “Don’t you have parameter hints like we do?”.

The answer is: Yes, Eclipse does have parameter hints since Eclipse 4.12, which was released back in June 2019. All you have to do is to enable them with a single checkbox click, since they are disabled by default:

Code Minings configuration

With this “Code Mining” enabled, the above method invocation now looks like this:

Code Minings enabled

The parameter hints are smart enough to disappear when the method parameter’s name is a substring of the input variable’s name:

Code Minings with matching input variable name

Methods with just a single parameter also don’t require hints in most cases, so they don’t show up to avoid clutter:

Code Minings with just a single parameter

As you can see from the configuration screenshot above, there are also other types of Code Minings, which display a (navigable) number of

  • interface implementations
  • references to a type, field, or method

Happy mining!