Keyboard shortcuts in PHPStorm

By Camilla Krag Jensen |

Coming from Vim to PHPStorm I use the mouse a whole lot more than I did before. Vim is amazing once you learn it and the mouse can take long naps when you do everything with keyboard commands. PHPStorm is a great IDE, so I switched because I felt like I got so much more good stuff like the debugger, easy refactoring, structural overview, and so on. In the beginning I used the IdeaVim plugin in PHPStorm so editing seemed more like Vim, but I ended up abandoning that because I found it buggy.

Anyway. I slowly learned new keyboard shortcuts for PHPStorm and I wanted to share some of my favorites. Jetbrains has a a list of keyboard shortcuts you cannot miss too, but most of the ones I find to be super useful are not on that list.

It should be said that I am on a Mac using the “Mac OS X 10.5” keymap in PHPstorm.

  • command+[ and command+] to go back to the place in the code where you just were or forward respectively.
  • command+shift+delete go back to the last place in code you edited.
  • cmd+F12 bring up a quick window with all functions/classes in the current file. Type to filter and go to. I use this one all the time. I realise that I could also just use option+command+o, but this one is much faster and narrowing down is easier.

Tools

  • command+1 toggles the project pane that shows the file tree. For extra usefulness, do this one time setting: Click the gear in the menu and choose “autoscroll from source”. Now the tree always shows you where you are in the file structure.
  • command+3 toggles the “find” pane. Useful for going back to see a global search done with command+shift+f. To navigate between search results use command+option+arrow-up/down
  • commmand+5 toggles the debugger pane.
  • command+7 toggles the PHP structure pane.
  • command+9 toggles the version control pane. I don’t use this a whole lot—I prefer the command line for Git, but there are some nice features in the VCS tools in PHPStorm. My favorite VCS keyboard shortcut (actually this one is kind of a sequence) is ctrl+v and then hit 5 to get a Git blame panel.

In the debugger

  • option+command+r will resume.
  • command+f2 will stop (kill).
  • F8 will step.
  • shift+command+F8 will show you a list of all your breakpoints.

These are some of my favorites. Comment and share yours!