RAD Studio Keyboard Shortcuts
The RAD Studio IDE has a great number of keyboard shortcuts that can save you from grabbing the mouse and help you code even faster. The RAD Studio keyboard shortcuts can help developer productivity during many of the regular jobs a developer does in the IDE including,
- Navigating your project within the IDE
- Writing code faster with code completion, code templates, macro recording (and playback), code folding, and books
- Advanced refactoring, and basic search and replace
- Selecting, moving, and rearranging components at design time
- Opening or selecting specific IDE windows
- Running and debugging projects
- Creating ToDo’s
The RAD Studio IDE is a really powerful code editor, but with so many shortcuts, it’s often hard to know where to start. Following discussions with a group of new users recently that were up-skilling to RAD Studio, I have created this printable keyboard cheat sheet that is really useful to keep close to hand or put on the wall. Not all keyboard shortcuts are in here, but I have focused on many of the commonly used ones that are not specific to the operating system. For the complete guide, visit DocWiki.
Click to open the PDF version or Remix the Original
Learning more about RAD Studio IDE Productivity Shortcuts
There are a number of blog posts and articles that have been created over the years discussing shortcuts and IDE productivity. Here are a few favorites to help you further.
- DocWiki Default Keyboard Shortcuts
- LearnDelphi.org – (Blog and Video) Learn how to code faster in Delphi using keyboard shortcuts
- IDE Productivity keystrokes (blog) and
- IDE Productivity Tips and Techniques video (video)
- Delphi Fandom – which includes versions some shortcuts were added
Can you use alternative Keyboard Mappings in RAD Studio, Delphi, C++Builder?
Yes, you can! The RAD Studio IDE Keyboard mappings can be set to a number of different formats, including Visual Basic and Visual Studio. For a full index of keyboard mappings, visit DocWiki Keyboard Mappings Index. This can really help if you are using alternative layouts in other software on a regular basis and are used to those keyboard mapping.
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26 years using Delphi and I have NEVER used the record Macro feature. If it’s important enough to appear on this cheat sheet, maybe we need a blog post on what it can do and why it’s so powerful ?
Have you ever had to do the same thing in text, e.g Find the Next Instance of ‘Foo’ and change it to ‘Fee’, but ONLY want to change certain places, and not all of them? You can’t use a global find replace in this instance.
By recording a macro, you can use keyboard to replace or insert something, and then move to the next instance. You can then see if you want to replace the next one, or press ctrl+l to find the next instance and skip replacing that one.
Another Macro I often record is to add a comment into the code if I’ve just changed something. This way, I can still keep using the clipboard and save a few key presses every time I want to add a comment.
For completing your resource list, here is Carry Jensen’s IDE Key list: http://www.jensendatasystems.com/DelphiEditorKeyTable.pdf