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Do you know where ‘Go To…’ can get you?

January 19th, 2012 by Anna Kozlova

How often do you use ‘Go To Class/File/Symbol’ feature in IntelliJ IDEA? Pretty often I would guess. But do you know everything you can do with it? Let me go through a couple of often overlooked gems.

Do you know that when you search for file or class you can preview an image (Ctrl-Shift-I) or see a quick doc (Ctrl-Q)?

It is also possible to open multiple items in the editor (multiselect with Ctrl or Shift) or run multiple selected tests right from the search (Ctrl-Shift-F10).

And you can open all search results in the ‘Find’ tool-window to process them one by one later.

Did I mention your favorite feature? No? Please, share it with everyone! :)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 11:54 am and is filed under FYI, Tips & Tricks. 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.

9 Responses to “Do you know where ‘Go To…’ can get you?”

  1. BenP Says:
    January 19th, 2012 at 12:12 pm

    My favourite use is simply Find Usages (Alt+F7) from a Go To Class dropdown. It means that you don’t need to open the class before looking for references.

  2. Eugene Toporov Says:
    January 19th, 2012 at 1:25 pm

    @BenP: A nice one!

  3. Bill Says:
    January 19th, 2012 at 10:53 pm

    I love reading these tips, but is there a manual somewhere explaining all of them? I feel like I’m getting a few intriguing tidbits from these blog posts, but how do I get the whole picture?

  4. Carsten Schlipf Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 5:11 am

    My favorite is that you can start with the first letters of the parts of a camel case type without completing the separated words. E.g. for finding ExtractClassTest you can type ExtClTe or even just ECT.

  5. BenP Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 5:28 am

    One enhancement to this feature would be to specify a line number. If I’m reading a stack trace from a log file, sometimes I want to go to MyClass line 90, I need to go to the class first, then Ctrl+G, type ‘90′, enter. It’s a lot of keystrokes.

    I’ve often wondered why I can’t type Ctrl+N, MyClass:90, enter, which opens MyClass and positions the cursor at line 90.

  6. Alexander Doroshko Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 7:19 am

    @BenP you can do it using Go To File action (Ctrl+Shift+N)

  7. Philip Herbst Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 9:29 am

    @Alexander
    I often wondered why “go to line” doesn’t work with Ctrl+N?

  8. BenP Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 9:35 am

    @Alexander oh, you’re right.. How come it doesn’t work on Go To Class too?

  9. Alexander Doroshko Says:
    January 20th, 2012 at 10:12 am

    @BenP Files have lines. Classes have fields, methods, etc., but no lines.

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