Going Commando in Flash Builder

December 3, 2009

Along with the Custom Components in Flex 4 presentation I shared yesterday, I also gave a 15 minute lightening talk at Adobe DevSummit on Keyboard Productivity in Flash Builder, this was just a quick show and tell where I walked people through various ways of what Jeff Atwood calls Going Commando …

Shortcuts

Here are some Flash Builder Keyboard shortcuts I use very frequently, if you have suggestions on others that are especially handy, please let me know …

CMD + 3	- the swiss knife of a commando, jump to anywhere inside eclipse
CMD + SHIFT + T	- find type
CMD + SHIFT + R	- find resource
CMD + O	- find/jump within class
CMD + E	- switch editors (CMD 3 also works for this)
CMD + D	- delete line which has cursor, without having to select
ALT + Up/Down Arrows	- Move Line/Selection Up/Down
ALT + CMD + Up/Down Arrows	- Copy Line/Selection Up/Down
CMD + W	- Close tab

* CMD on OSX = CTRL on Windows

Customize

If you press CMD+3 and type “keys”, you’ll see the keyboard customization preferences panel for Flash Builder, I recommend spending some time customizing Builder for your own needs, for example I use CMD+1 and CMD+2 to switch between Develop/Debug perspectives. I barely use the NumPad on my keyboard so I’ve customized it to be all keyboard shortcuts, pressing CMD+0 inserts snippets

Snippets

Having a good snippets plugin can greatly improve a developer’s productivity, I love how Snippets work in TextMate, I’m still searching for a good solution for this in Flash Builder, till now I’ve been using CFEclipse’s SnipTreeView but the problem is it only works with AS3 code and can’t handle MXML. I was so desperate one day that I figured out that it fails because the CFEclipse InsertSnippetAction class on Line No 71 assumes that the editor is an ITextEditor, while this is true for most Eclipse editors, the MXML editor is actually made of 2 editors a Design Editor and an ITextEditor, so the type cast on Line 71 fails … I never got to building CFEclipse on my own though. But, it looks like Lee Brimelow did, he has released a fix which makes SnipTreeView work with MXML editor, unfortunately though Lee’s fix doesn’t work for me because of a Java version issue on OSX Leopard.

Another handy Mac only tool is TextExpander. It sometimes breaks your formatting in eclipse, but that has gotten better with Flash Builders new auto formatting improvements.

Multi Clipboard

A multi-clipboard tool is another must have for all developers, I use Jumpcut on OSX and it is a big big productivity boost to not have switch between files and applications when copying and pasting. I don’t know any good equivalent for Windows, so if you know of one, please let me know.

Finally, I have to thank Chetan Sachdev because he got me hooked to optimizing my workflow using the keyboard while we were working together on a project earlier this year.

I would love to know if you have any other handy tips on Going Commando.