Introduction

PHPStorm is a very popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

for PHP, released by JetBrains. In my opinion it is the best IDE or text editor that you can find, if you use PHP.

I've been using it for many years, and although it occassionaly has a few very minor bugs or annoyances, it would be

hard to find a better program to code in.

If you use Vim normally, you will be

happy to know that there is a good Vim emulator plugin. It covers most (but not all) features, and normally works

very well.

This is a basic guide to the most important keyboard shortcuts that you need to know when using PHPStorm.

The options panel is very comprehensive, and you can always assign custom keyboard shortcuts. There is also the very

useful Key Promoter plugin that you can install - after you perform certain actions it'll show a

small popup window saying what keyboard shortcut could have achieved the same action. It is a great way to learn

some new keyboard shortcuts, which'll speed up your development time!

The super essential PHPStorm keyboard shortcuts to know

Apart from obvious things like copy (cmd/ctrl + c), paste (cmd/ctrl + v) etc, the following keyboard shortcuts are

very important when you use PHPStorm and I really recommend you make good use of them!

Quick search ("Search Everywhere")

The Search Everywhere popup is very useful! You can, unsuprisingly enough, search for anything here!

Files, classes, objects, variabls, etc.

You can even search for PHPStorm settings:

(I actually find that sometimes I have to press shift 3 times in a row to get it to popup)

Related shortcut: Search for classes:

If you know you are looking for a certain class file, then press Ctrl + O (⌘ + O on mac) and start typing what you

are looking for.

]

Related shortcut: Search for file

Another related search function is shift + ctrl + o (or shift + ⌘ + O), which lets you search by filename. You can

click the filter icon (blue in the screenshots) to filter by certain filetype.

Extend selection

This is a very useful keyboard shortcut when selecting text. Press the shortcut and it will smartly expand the selection (from the narest quotes, to next 'block'). It is a little bit hard to explain, but check it out. It is an easy one to remember (especially the Mac OS shortcut of ⌥ and up arrow).

]

Shrink selection

The opposite of extending selection is to shrink it.

View recent files

Use this to quickly switch between recent files. Type in a few characters of its name, and select what you want with

the mouse or the arrow keys.

View recently edited file

Similar to the above "View recent files", but only show recently edited files

Add comment

Use this keyboard shortcut to quickly and easily comment out lines (or a block, if more than one line is currently selected.

If a line is already commented then you can use the same keyboard shortcut to do the reverse.