Still trying to get used to Intellij IDEA.
One of the major gripes I still have: keyboard shortcuts. Not only that they differ from what I am used to (how dare they). Quite often they are not working!
I am using a MacBook Air with OS X Lion and many of the shortcuts used by IDEA (especially for debugging) are already claimed by OS X. So I switched off most of Lion’s Shortcuts.
But still: I am using a German keyboard. A German laptop keyboard.
And IDEA insists on telling me that “Comment line with Line Comment” is
⌘/
It is not. It is
⌘_
On a German keyboard the underscore character is placed on the key that is used by the slash on American keyboards. No big deal, but all keyboard shortcuts using “[“, ”]”, “{”, and “}” are useless. To use them on a German keyboard you have to press the “⌥” modifier. And that seems to severely confuse IDEA. Pressing the keys where these characters are on an American keyboard doesn’t help either.
Jetbrains seems to use some low level keyboard access method that checks for the key pressed and not for the character delivered. I wouldn’t mind, if they could get their menus and keymap right, so that “⌘_” is displayed.
The company is located in the Czech Republic and in Russia. I would have expected that they have the same problem, but perhaps they are only using American keyboards.
Instead of whining some more, I decided to create my own keyboard mapping. Simple enough. But among the many tools I am using on many different computers, I need a keyboard cheat sheet. And perhaps someone else as well? Therefore I created a Word template that you may use to create your own cheat sheet:
Word template: IDEA-Keyboard-Shortcuts–1.0.docx
(The template is based on Jetbrain’s own Reference Card)
I am quite sure that there are still some errors. So please put any corrections into the comments of this blog post.
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