Question

I’m wondering if you can do something similar to this functionality (available with Zend Studio 5.1) in Eclipse. There is an image of it in action here: http://tinypic.com/r/2d1pao1/6

As you can see, it doesn’t just put a box around the starting brace like Eclipse does, it actually shows you the declaration. This is especially handy when you have a really long declaration and don’t want to scroll up and find its beginning.

Answer 1

(Update May 2012)

The latest “Eclipse 3.8 and 4.2 M7 – New and Noteworthy” introduced Bracket matching improvements in Java editor:

You can hover over a closing curly brace and see the source near the matching opening brace in a hover.
This is helpful when you want to see the code near the start of a long code block.
The hover also tells the number of lines in the code block.

The hover is also useful to temporarily ‘highlight’ a short code block.

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Original answer (December 2009)

Actually, you already have a variant of that with the outline view

If you click anywhere in a function (end of curly brace or anywhere else), the outline view will… outline the relevant function where you are in.

_{(source: eclipse.org)}

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Otherwise, you need a plugin like Eclipse Source Helper
(update site: http://www.hexapixel.com/update)