42 Tips and Tricks

Become an IDE champ with these bite-sized tips and tricks.

Development is about focus and flow. Learning your tool helps you get into the flow and stay there.

This playlist shows a variety of IDE tips and tricks from across the major usages of PyCharm.

Find Action

Skip memorizing keyboard shortcuts and speed search for actions instead.

This is it, the biggest tip.

Our IDEs have an incredible number of useful actions, with many bound to keyboard shortcuts. You often discover one and think "That would be so useful!" But you then realize: "I don't want to use my mouse and I'll never remember shortcut number 427."

Lots of shortcuts. Different shortcuts on different operating systems. Too much to remember!

There's a better way: Don't.

Instead, memorize one shortcut: Find Action (Shift-Ctrl-A Win/Linux, Shift-Cmd-A macOS). With your keyboard and one highly-remembered shortcut, you get fast access to all actions.

Invoking Find Action pops up the Find panel with tabs for All, Classes, Files, Symbols, and Action, with Action highlighted.

Start typing the name of the action you're looking for and the autocomplete filters out the choices. Grayed-out actions are not valid in the context. Results also show the keyboard shortcut when an action has one.

Or use speed typing by putting in the first few letters of each word in the action. For Find in Path, fi pa makes it the first-listed action in the results.

One last point: Find Action also matches preferences, and some are inline toggleable. Want to disable tabs without opening settings/preferences? Start Find Action and type wi pl no for the Window | Editor Tabs | Tabs Placement: None preference.