Looking for PHP Storm Shortcuts and Themes to make your life as a developer that little bit easier? Take a look below for our developers guide to terminal shortcuts and making your PHP Storm operations unique!
Shortcuts
Definition – A selection of one or more specific keys that will activate a useful feature in the software. These save lots of time when compared to navigating to these features with the mouse:
- Ctrl + F : Find in file
- Ctrl + R : Replace in file
- Ctrl + X : Cut line
- Ctrl + Y : Delete line
- Ctrl + D : Duplicate line
- Ctrl + Mouse scroll : Increase/decrease font size in file
- Ctrl + Shft + F : Find in project
- Ctrl + Shft + R : Replace in project
- Ctrl + Shft + N : Find file in project
- Ctrl + Shft + Alt + L : Reformat file
Themes
Definition – A theme applies a different look to your editor, providing a fresh look with new icons, fonts and layouts.
At PushON, we are huge fans of GTK+ Adapta Notko. A dark theme consisting of deep, muted blues and bright pastels for icons and text, it’s very easy on the eyes and works even better when your whole machine is using the same theme.
Plugins
Definition – A plugin extends your editor with full suites of new features tailored to your needs.
Magicento is a PHPStorm plugin for Magento developers, and is a firm favourite of the Magento development team at PushON. Features include Goto for factories and template paths, autocomplete for factories, xml files and class names, documentation for xml nodes, evaluation of PHP code inside Magento environment, and much more.
Another favourite is Material Theme UI, a plugin that restyles PHPStorm to a dark blue/purple theme and adds some helpful features like new icons, nav bars and dropdowns.
The Terminal
At PushON we use Oh My Zsh -a framework for the command line terminal. It is “an open-source, community-driven framework for managing your ZSH configuration. It comes bundled with a ton of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes.”
Oh my Zsh makes it easy for the development team to install themes to our terminals and make them pretty. It includes syntax highlighting so text is properly formatted and easy to interpret. One of the biggest advantages is a feature called “alias” which allows us to shorten commonly used commands. For example, we can shorten “git status” to “gs”, or “n98magreun.phar” to “n98”. This saves us a lot of time and makes the terminal an overall much more pleasant experience.
Our team recommends Rofi, a window switcher, application launcher and ssh manager, which allows the team to shortcut the processes to:
- Execute commands anywhere on your workspace
- Open a terminal that automatically SSHs into a server
- Find and switch to any window
These actions are enabled all at the stroke of a key (ALT + D).
Example:
- Open Rofi (Alt + D)
- Type ‘ticket {ticket number}’
- This will open any ticket in freshdesk
When it comes to optimsing terminal usage, the team at PushON also recommend:
I3-gaps WM – A tiling window manager:
- Switch between various workspaces on the fly
- Reduce use of mouse
- Increase efficiency
VScode:
- Lightweight IDE built to be configured to use with any language. I.e. PHP
- Fully customisable
And there you have it! A summary of the most effective shortcuts, recommended themes, and terminal frameworks to make your life as a developer that little bit easier.
