Question

When I use Eclipse’s Ctrl-Shift-o to organize imports, Ctrl-1 for quick-fix, or alt-space to complete a reference, I’d like to be able to specify a preferred package (or alternately ignore a list of packages) to avoid namespace collisions. For instance, we always want java.util.List, but end up seeing the following dialog much too frequently:

Is there any way to avoid this?

Answer 1

Eclipse supports negative import filters. For example, you can filter all java.awt.* and javax.swing.* packages so that they never come up as an option. This can be done in the preferences under the Java > Appearance > Type Filters menu.

Incidentally, this is quite awkward, which lead me to file an enhancement request to make it much simpler to filter unused types.