Farata Systems Flex Blog
Flex Builder Shortcuts
Useful Flex Builder keyboard shortcuts and hints
Jul. 21, 2006 10:00 PM
Adobe Flex Builder has many
convenient keyboard commands and hints that make your programming
faster. You can see the complete list of all available shortcuts by
pressing Ctrl-Shift-L. But this is a list of Flex Builder shortcuts
and hints that I use on a regular basis.
1.If you see a little asterisk in the tab with the your file name, this means that this file has some unsaved code changes.
2.Pressing Ctrl-S saves the
file and compiles your code. If saving the file does not generate any
messages, it’s the good news: your code does not have compilation
errors.
3.Highlight the name of
the class or a function and press the button F3 on your keyboard. This
will take you to the source code of this class.
4.If some of the lines are
marked with red error circles, move the mouse over the circle and Flex
Builder will display the text describing this error.
5.Press Ctrl-Space to get context-sensitive help.
6.Alt + / will complete the name of the variable or a class after you typed in a couple of its first letters.
7.Press Ctrl-F11 to run the last-launched program again. Hit F11 to run the program in a debug mode.
8.Place the cursor after a curly brace and Flex Builder will mark the matching brace.
9.Highlight a line or a block of code and press Alt-ArrowUp or Alt-ArrowDown. The selected code will move up or down.
10.Alt and arrow keys moves from one open class tab to the next one.
11.Ctrl-H will open a popup to search on multiple files, and Ctrl-F will let you find text in the open file.
12.To copy a class from one
project to another, select the class and press Ctrl-C. Select the
destination package and press Ctrl-V.
13.Highlight the MXML tag or ActionScript class and press Shift-F2. This will open a screen with the language reference help on the selected element.
14.Highlight a block of code and press Ctrl-Shift-C to comment out the selected block of code.
15.Ctrl-Shift-D inserts the <![CDATA[ ]]> block in your code.
16.To select surrounding containers, select a GUI control and press F4.
17.If your project relies on
the code from external libraries, right-click on the project name,
select Properties | Build Path and press the button Add SWC.
18.As you change you code in the editor, Flex Builder
puts a vertical purple bar on the left of each modified line. This is
quite handy if you’d like to have a quick look at the new code before
pressing the button Save.
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About Yakov FainYakov Fain is a Managing Director of
Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book ,
Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Yakov co-athored the O'Reilly book "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.