ABAP Developer Tools – the Fine Tuning

Without touching every detail of the ABAP Development Tools installation; I’d like to show You some features of ABAP in Eclipse to fine tune the look and feel and behavior. The eye-catching adjustments help You to configure ADT to Your own flavour. To see the adjustments instantly, log on to an SAP system in advance. Due incompatibility I’m not using any 3rd party theme, just the built-in Dark/Light, due this is what SAP supports to be consistent.

Keyword Colors – Focus easily during analyzing and reading the source code

This is not marketing, but frankly, Eclipse beats ABAP Editor in SE80. Custom colors are also possible. Keywords are not just blue anymore, wow. I like it. As You can see the statements which control the program flow, quitting a block or program unit got emphasized.

TAB settings, to match the ABAP Editor in SE80

Code Completion – ABAP

Also suggest non-keywords can be helpful for everyone. The other ones are rather individual preferences to set / unset.

For non-UK keyboards (a special language and layout ) the Automatically replace '-' can be helpful, or for lazy people as well 😉 .

Code completion – CDS Annotation

Working heavily with Metadata Annotations deserves Structured insertion of CDS annotations.

Format DDL on Save

Do You save CDS data definitions always with correct syntax 🙂 ?
Yes => do formatting automatically

Adjust Editor Font

You feel Consolas font boring, You like better readability ? My personal favorites are Fira and Hack. they have some cool features. You will recognize when working with relational operators or addressing members of an object.

Both Text Font and Block Selection Font have to be adjusted under Basic node to the same format and font.

Isn’t it looks immediately better ?

Keyword, Decoration and other text colors

You can setup the color of the project explorer descriptions, and actually the color of many text types, just look around and adjust according to your own wishes 🙂 .

The most common I apply is adjusting the Keyword and Literal colors. I like the more relaxed green than the eye-burning blue.

Dark Theme Custom colors (RGB):

• ABAP- Syntax Coloring
  • Keyword: 43,149,62
  • Literal: 128,128,64
• CDS
  • Keyword: 43,149,62
  • Literal: 128,128,64

Font Size in Project Explorer and other trees/tables in panels

Annotations

You have the possibility to fine tune the Highlight colors and others as well. For better readability we can for example adjust the Write occurrence positions.

If You look around in the preferences pane, You might discover other customization possibilities. Try-catch 😉 .