Keyboard shortcuts in PHPStorm

By Camilla Krag Jensen naxoc |

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!