Learn IntelliJ Shortcuts with the IntelliJTutor

Whether it is CLion, PyCharm or IntelliJ, many people use some Jetbrain IDE in their daily life. These IDEs have many great features, work on all distributions and just make your work easier. However, most people don’t use the full potential these programs allow. Many developers don’t use any shortcuts at all, but just use their mouse or touchpad to click buttons inside the IDE.

In my eyes, that’s a real bummer. You can get much more done by using some shortcuts in your day to day work. Moving your fingers to your pointing device just slows you down. Keeping your hands on the keyboard and pressing shortcuts is much faster and more precise than moving the cursor on the screen.

To help you getting started with shortcuts, I created a project called IntelliJTutor. The tutorial is very self explanatory and you shouldn’t have any problem using it. Nevertheless, if you have any concerns with it, just create an issue or pull request on GitHub or write a command below this post.

The name and the project are an homage to the Vimtutor. When I started learning Vim with all of it shortcuts, it was so great to have the Vimtutor to guide me through the most basic commands to control Vim.

As I have to work a lot with IntelliJ and Android Studio these days, I thought it would be nice to have a tutor for these IDEs too. The shortcuts I mention in the tutorial work for WebStorm, CLion and all the other Jetbrain IDEs as well.

If you want to take a look at the tutor, you can find it here.

What do you think about this project? Is it a good start for learning shortcuts or do you find it frustrating? Please share your opinion in the comment section.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day,

Niklas