Apps and Freedom

Something that has annoyed me in the past is when I generate a new class, Eclipse puts the @author tag in the comments with my machine username. It ends up looking like this:


/*
* @author ID123
*/

Which is really not that helpful in some contexts. In the systems I work on, its just not simple to find out who that is. Since these are comments and not database entries, I’d rather see the name of the author.

The easiest way to fix this is to modify the default @author in Eclipse settings. To do so, do the following:

1. Window ->Preferences
2. Expand Java-> Code Style
3. Click Code Templates
4. On the right, expand Comments and click on Types
5. Click the Edit button on the right and change ${user} to your name (or you can even enter your name after the user variable if the user ID is valuable to you).

Now you can have this in your code instead:

/*
* @author ID123 - Terry Pearson
*/

Thank you Aaron Saray for the tip!