Shortcuts of the Day

One aspect of working as a professional programmer that I think sometimes is overlooked is being proficient with your tools. Because our work is so focused on thinking it’s easy to miss that intermixed with all of this thinking you also perform typing and browsing of the code. Optimizing this, more practical, aspect of the work not only saves you time, it primarily saves you mental energy for the thinking part. That’s why I think it’s worth while for anyone that is or want to be a professional programmer to learn touch typing and to invest time and effort in learning shortcuts for whatever IDE you hppen to be using. It’s not a one of effort, it’s a continuous process where it makes sense to learn and integrate new tools that become available into your workflow.

For me, I yesterday learned three shortcuts for IntelliJ that I think will make my everyday coding happier:

• Ctrl + F12 to find a method in the current file
• Ctrl + Shift + Alt + n to find a symbol anywhere in the project
• Ctrl + F8 to toggle a breakpoint on the current line.

Every small feature that simplifies your workflows will help push the needle to more productivity.