在IntelliJ IDEA中选择键盘快捷键的原理是什么？

Question

There are lots of useful functions of Intellij IDEA and for many of them there are keyboard shortcuts.

But remembering shortcuts may be difficult, at least for me.

Are there some consistent guiding principles by which these shortcuts were selected by designers? I believe learning such principles would be helpful to memorize shortcuts itself.

Answer 1

I think that the closest answer you're going to get is "it depends". Some shortcuts are obviously chosen, because the keybinding describes what the shortcut does, for example ⌘ + O means open, not only in IntelliJ but in many places throughout OS X.

Some shortcuts probably don't have any kind of such semantic meaning, such as Alt + Enter and are chosen because they are very frequently used and the placement of the keys relative to each other is comfortable.

Other keyboard shortcuts with similar purpose have the same starting sequence of keys. For instance the extract refactoring shortcuts, which are as follows:

• ⌘ + Alt + M - extract method
• ⌘ + Alt + C - extract constant
• ⌘ + Alt + V - extract variable
• ⌘ + Alt + F - extract field
• ⌘ + Alt + P - extract parameter

So in such case you only need to remember that if you want to extract something, you press ⌘ + Alt and the first letter of what you want to extract.

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That being said, I don't believe that the way to learning the keybindings is memorizing them, but using them. If you use one keybinding multiple times, over the time you will memorize it. You can help this process for instance by locating the action you want to perform in the menu, but instead of clicking it look at the keyboard shortcut next to it and press it. Or find the action using ⌘ + Shift + A , look at the shortcut and use it.

There are even plugins, which can help you with this, for instance Key Promoter which you can install via Settings/Plugins/Browse Repositories . This plugin shows you shortcut you can use when you invoke some actions by clicking it in menu, etc. It also shows you how many times you've used this action in such a way instead of using the corresponding shortcut.