Kirill Smelov's PHPStorm Tips in 9 Gifs

2 min

Thu, Dec 13, 2018

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Last week we hosted Kirill Smelov in Friends of PHP meetup in Prague. Usually, I know most of tricks people show in PHPStorm talks or they pick too complicated cases - like SSH to Docker via PHPStorm GUI.



Kirill's talk was completely different, I could not stop taking notes about simple yet less known features of PHPStorm.



Instead of watching the 45-min talk, enjoy 9 cherry picked tips in 4,5-min gifs. I've dropped a few of my own daily habits. Enjoy!

1. Ctor - when you add a property via constructor









2. Post-Fix

Do you type the same code around a variable zillion times?









3. Forget $this->









4. Jump to Next use of Method









5. Save Live Template









6. Jump to Another Method









7. Copy FQN class or File:line









8. Jump to previous File → Jump to previous File









9. Create a shortcut









How to Work With Shortcuts?

Get inspired by watching others, but in the end - always respect your brain. Every one of you has different preferences.

Let say you create a shortcut "new file":

you might like starting letter of action: nf

or 2 letters of each word: nefi

or just one letter, because you use 1 action per letter: n

Punish vs. Typo-Proof

Also, as I love to type fast like crazy, I often make a typo or don't remember the exact 2 letters. Why punish yourself for a typo or not remembering the right combination?

Add a fallback:

rf → return false;

refa → return false;

ref → return false;

reaf → return false;

To give you an idea of my daily work, here is my current list of live templates:

Start with Single Step

I took notes about 15 items during Kirill's talk. They all were very interesting and I wanted to integrate at least 5 of them the very next day. I was excited about my skills going the speed of light. I put too much on myself, then I was afraid I will fail to integrate them all. So I ended-up using just one.

What could I do different? Pick just one tip. Master it and then move to another.





What is the 1 tip you'll use tomorrow?

Integrate it and if you want more, you can always come back to this post.





Thanks to Presentation Assistant for the green banner that helped to make this post.