Review your statistics, and use the knowledge wisely. It also tells me which features I’m not using very often, identifying places where I can improve my shortcut skills. You can do it as well by navigating to the View menu and unchecking all the marks (you may want to leave the ‘Status Bar’):Īs you can see, shortcuts saved me from typing more than 20,000 additional characters (over the course of six months) and prevented about 1,000 bugs. When I was studying shortcuts, I turned off all menus, tabs, navigation bars, etc. The fastest way to learn is to not give yourself an alternative to keyboard shortcuts. Train Yourself To Use PhpStorm’s Shortcuts My recommendation? Engage in a race as a morning warm-up each day. There are also competitive typing websites, such as, where you can compete with other people in typing. If you’re not already typing at least 50 words per minute (WPM), find a touch typing training website such as, and increase your speed. While typing isn’t connected directly to IDE skills, shortcuts are useless if you need to stare at your keyboard to find every single key. There’s a reason for that: It’s much more efficient. If you compare a seasoned programmer and an ordinary PC user, the first thing you’ll notice is that the programmer spends nearly all of her time using a keyboard and hardly ever touches the mouse. Let’s start with the simplest and maybe the most important skill for any IDE: proper keyboard usage. This article covers the popular, robust IntelliJ IDEA IDE PhpStorm, and how, with a little effort, you can easily double your efficiency and even prevent bugs while you code. You need to be able to work properly with version control systems, continuous integration tools, virtual machine management services (like Vagrant) and, obviously, your integrated development environment (IDE). Second, but no less important, is working knowledge of the supplemental tools you use everyday in your workflow.

If you are a LAMP developer, you undoubtedly need to be an expert in PHP and MySQL, know modern frameworks, and have some decent skills in Linux administration. This design resource supports most products in these categories.Ĭheck the product details page to verify support.What does it mean to be a good software developer?įirst, it requires deep knowledge of the particular tech stack you’re working in.

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