Flex – fuel injected

I’m a big fan of making the development process as efficient as possible. Using frameworks, components, svn or whatever to get the job done on time. And where better to shave the seconds, minutes, hours off than at grass roots in the FlexBuilder Editor.

Taking a bit of time to learn the shortcuts can really help speed up the development of your code and even help with your RSI.

1. Snippets

First off head over to Lee Brimelow’s site for a great tutorial on how to add a snippets panel to FlexBuilder using the CFEclipse plugin.

Once installed, configure the plugin to automatically insert your everyday code snippets with a few key strokes. E.g. spit out the shell code for private & public methods, addEventListener, getters & setters, event handlers, the list is endless.

2. Class/Resource quick jump – (ctrl+shift+T/R)

This is my favourite shortcut at the moment. Once your application gets beyond a certain size you can waste a lot of time hunting down a class you haven’t touched in months and need to edit.

Hit “Ctrl+Shift+T”/ “Ctrl+Shift+R” and you’ll be presented with a neat quick jump navigator for your classes & resources. Start typing the first few characters of your class name and the list will get filtered down to a reasonable size whereby you can clicking select the file you need.

3. Jump to open class – (ctrl+shift+tab)

Got so many classes open there’s no room for them in the tab bar? Hit ‘Ctrl+Shift+Tab’ and you’ll get a list of every class you’ve currently got open. Use the mouse or arrow keys to jump to the class you’re looking for.

4. Duplicate selection & switch line – (ctrl+alt+up/down) / (alt+up/down)

Two of the most useful day to day shortcuts in Flex. Hit ‘Ctrl+Alt+(up/down arrow)’ to duplicate your current selection and ‘Alt+(up/down arrow)’ to shift your selection up or down the page.

Update:

Go and cough up for a copy of SourceMate by Element River. Best add-on for Flash Builder by miles.