Neat "hidden" features

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After answering a few prayers on the forums, I realized that there are some features of the IDE which people don't seem to know about.

  • You can hold down Option (on the Mac) or Shift (on Windows and Linux) when double-clicking in the project item editor to open the item up in the alternate editor. So, for instance, if you Shift+Double Click on Window1, the it opens up the source code editor instead of the window editor.
  • If you hold down Ctrl (on Windows and Linux) or Cmd (on the Mac) when double-clicking a word in the code editor, it performs a "go to" operation on it. So if you double-click on a method name, it will take you to that method. This is a really handy way to get around in the code editor (even if it is more hidden than I'd like it to be).
  • More Cmd/Ctrl fun -- if you hold down the key when clicking on a link in the debugger, it will open the link up in a separate window. The same is true of double clicking items in the project item editor or window editor.
  • In the location field, if you enter (Home), it will bring you to the Project tab. Similarly, if you enter (Errors) it will bring you to the errors tab, and (Search) will bring you to the search results editor. (Super) will bring you to an item's superclass as well in a future release.
  • The code editor has a very nice contextual menu for doing various fun things like a GoTo, a find in help, and insert color. The code browser (listbox directly to the left of the code editor) has some refactoring fun on it such as converting a regular property into a computed property.
  • You can drag re-order tabs in the IDE by clicking the tab and dragging it around. If you drag it up or down, you can tear it off into its own window. Similarly, you can drag re-order buttons on the toolbar in the same way (but you can't tear them off).
  • The window editor has a nice contextual menu also. You can use it to select hard-to-find items (page panels seem to be especially hard to locate, I've found), or to add new items to the window. You can also use it to jump to a code editor for anything on the window, and even check keyboard mnemonics!

There are tons of other awesome features the IDE has squirreled away which I'm forgetting to list. But this is a list of the common items that people seem to not know about.

4 Comments

Seems like someone should put in a feature request to make sure all these hidden gems get into a contextual menu so they are at least discoverable that way

They already are in contextual menus.

Then they're really not "hidden" just not commonly known ?

When I say "hidden" I figured it;s one of those "if you know the magic handshake you can use these things" but if you don't you can't because they don't show up anywhere.

Those kind drive me nuts


Thanks for the complete list of hidden treasures.

/msa

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