Is there a unified keyboard shortcut solution for IDEs, like Eclipse, IntellJ, JDeveloper... So I don't need to remember so many shortcuts?

Question

We developers often working on some different projects and often we need to switch IDE tools, like Eclipse, JDeveloper, IntelliJ. But one problem is there are so many keyboard shortcuts to remember...

But that's quite a burden to memorize these. So I want to minimize the memory burden and hope to use the same shortcuts everywhere.

I searched online and found there was an old project on Mac OS for this proposal (https://github.com/fe9lix/CodingKeys).

"What problem does it solve? Nowadays, developers often work in several different development environments and text editors. For example, you may need Eclipse for regular Java development, Android Studio for Android development, Xcode for iOS development, Visual Studio for C#, Sublime Text for web development, etc.. Every tool, however, has different keyboard shortcuts. Since it is hard to remember all shortcuts, there's a constant loss of productivity when switching tools. If you don't want to edit all shortcut sets in every tool, you can instead use CodingKeys as an "abstraction layer".

CodingKeys lets you define unified shortcuts, which are dynamically re-mapped to existing shortcuts of other applications when you switch tools. All mappings can be conveniently edited in a single configuration file. The config file also gives you a nice overview of all shortcuts and grows as you add new apps to your coding toolbox."

This is exactly what I need. However, I didn't find anything like this on Windows or Linux.

So firstly I want to know how these shortcuts invented at the very beginning?

Are they just come up from someone's mind and then all followers adopted that. Or have they collected some stats and found what are the most frequently used keys?

Can we do some stats and build the best shortcuts for all IDEs?

So is it possible to unite all keyboard shortcuts across IDEs? Or how to reach there (if not today maybe we can reach there in future)?

Appointor

IDEA has Eclipse keymap – Gear

Answer 1

A lot of IDEs and Editors today have one of their standard keymaps, but they also come along with keymaps from an other IDEs and editors as well.

For example, if you are using Visual Studio Code, they have their standard keybindings, but if you come from an other editor, you can search extensions for other keymaps as well:

Anyway, any editor or IDE you use, just search their plugins or extensions for keymaps and you can install keymap you are familiar with.

My thought on unified keymap (one that you can always use), would be Vim keymap. If you learn that, you are on a good path in any editor.

Dulcia

Answer 2

Alternatives of CodingKeys for Windows and Linux

For Windows, you can try AutoHotkey and its remapping keys feature. Unlike some other solutions, it lets you remap the keys per application - by using the IfWinActive directive.

For Linux, there are probably some alternatives or ports, see https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/165124/autohotkey-equivalent.

How the shortcuts were invented?

Yes, I would also like to know. I'm afraid in some cases though, there was no deep investigation before introducing some shortcuts.

Another reason for editors having some unfortunate default shortcuts (both Eclipse and IDEA users will surely find some) may be that authors just don't want to change them, because they want to retain backwards compatibility for users. Even though in the long run it would possibly hurt less to change them to some common ones, which brings us to the last topic...

Can we do some stats and build the best shortcuts for all IDEs?

I was just thinking about this idea before getting to this question. It would be great to have some kind of initiative that would do the research and that would propose some "unified set of basic IDE shortcuts". It would consider not just IDEs, but text editors generally, while web browsers play an important role nowadays as well (with their navigation or debugging shortcuts).

It looks like there is no initiative like that so far. I can see 3 main reasons for that:

1. It definitely isn't easy to do the research and to agree on some common shortcuts that would satisfy all.
2. Unless using some workarounds like AutoHotkeys, it would require active cooperation of all the major IDEs authors in order to efficiently improve the current state of things. I'm not sure how realistic it is.
3. Although far from perfect (which is given by-design), there exist those predefined keymaps for various IDEs that can somewhat mitigate this problem.

Frowsty

An important aspect is reasoning about the shortcuts. A nice example: #2619728. – Truancy