From (My)Eclipse to XCode

As any Java developer worth his salt knows - if you’re going to be writing code in a productive way - you should at least know a handful of keyboard shortcuts in Eclipse. Yes I’m sure others use Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEA - but I have met them rarely and they often seem to have selected their IDE just to be different, awkward, or both (flame war starts here).

So important is the knowledge of shortcuts that I’ve often seen them on cheat sheets, stuck on the side of mugs, and described incredulously in code reviews when one developer who knows a shortcut, watches the other developer painfully scroll through a menu or type out a class name. Some developers - so happy that they’ve discovered something powerful - email all of their developer friends with the newly learnt shortcut only to be ridiculed in a barrage of replies with sentiments to the effect of: ‘You’ve been earning £X00 a day developing with Eclipse for 5 years and you didn’t know about shortcut X?’

So anyway, my first big hurdle with XCode was shortcuts. Without those I could not be as productive as I’d like. In fact - that wasn’t my first hurdle - first I needed to stop using Eclipse shortcuts in XCode.

So I’ll list my favorite XCode shortcuts. They are there in the preference panels, in books and on the side of mugs. But if like me you can’t be bothered to look and would rather have someone else tell you here they are:

• alt-cmd-up: Switch between header and implementation file
  
• alt-cmd-left: go to previous file
  
• alt-cmd-right: go to next file
  
• cmd-b:  start/stop build
  
• shift-cmd-k: clean all targets
  
• cmd-return: build and go (launches the iPhone simulator/device with your app)
  
• shift-cmd-d: find a source file
  
• shift-cmd-f: find text in the project sources