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Resize (tool) windows with keyboard

January 25th, 2010 by Kirill Kalishev

Since IntelliJ IDEA is so much loved by keyboard addicts, here is a tiny yet helpful feature introduced in version 9.0.2: you can change size of a tool window by means of your keyboard.

Say, you’re doing “find usages”, the tool window is popping up and it’s too small for you to comfortably look at the usages tree. Now you don’t have to grab a mouse to stretch it up, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Up (Meta-Shift-Up for Mac users) and your tool window is getting bigger.

So, if you need to resize a tool window: focus it (by Alt-number or Ctrl-Tab) and then use Ctrl-Shift plus an arrow key that points to the direction you want.

You can also use these arrow shortcuts to resize dialogs and actually any window that IntelliJ IDEA shows. Say, you opened the project structure dialog and it’s too narrow for you. Use Ctrl-Shift-Right and Ctrl-Shift-Down to make it bigger.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 1:35 am and is filed under How-To's, In Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

11 Responses to “Resize (tool) windows with keyboard”

  1. Kjetil Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 4:28 am

    Nice. But when exactly is 9.0.2 coming?

  2. Marcus Brito Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 6:26 am

    Now you just need to make sure keyboard focus isn’t jumping around convulsively or disappearing completely :)

  3. Kirill Kalishev Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 6:31 am

    Marcus, could you be more specific?

  4. Dan Lewis Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 8:10 am

    Tried it, didn’t work, then realized that 9.0.1 doesn’t have this feature, and so I thought, hey great, 9.0.2 must be out! But it’s not. Do I need to go over to EAP to get this feature?

  5. Kirill Kalishev Says:
    January 25th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

    Dan, Kjetil: you can have it now as a community edition build — http://www.jetbrains.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=983225

    An official 9.0.2 release is a matter of a few weeks.

  6. Geoffrey De Smet Says:
    January 26th, 2010 at 4:21 am

    Has there been any progress against the focus stealing issue?
    http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-27887

  7. Cristian Vasile Mocanu Says:
    January 26th, 2010 at 9:43 am

    Hi Kirill,

    Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down is already mapped to the (much more useful) “Move statements Up/Down”. Veteran IntelliJ users (like me) probably use Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down a lot to rearrange statements.
    You might want to change the keyboard shortcuts for this new feature to something else…
    What do you say about using the numpad arrows instead? E.g.: Ctrl+Numpad 4/6/2/8

    Best regards,
    Cristian

  8. Kon Soulianidis Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 1:13 am

    This is great, i hate reaching for the mouse.
    @Cristian, I think the use case is for when focus is given to a-non editor window. Those shortcuts wont work if you aren’t in the editor. If you are in the editor window, the first thing you would do is select the tab first (CTRL+TAB or ALT+number), then use those keys to resize. But of course I agree that consideration should be given so they dont accidentally remove functionality from these tabs by way of clashing shortcuts.
    Should give the EAP build a try to see how functional this is in practice, whether this will lead to accidentally moving statements.

  9. Kirill Kalishev Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 1:27 am

    Cristian, thank you, this makes sense

  10. Kirill Kalishev Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 1:28 am

    Geoffrey, yes, we are to finally fix this soon.

  11. Geoffrey De Smet Says:
    January 28th, 2010 at 2:40 am

    Wonderfull!

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