Delphi IDE Tips Session at User Group meeting

Today I gave a talk at the Maidenhead meeting of the UK Developers Group, for which I also acted as the M.C. (welcoming, running through the agenda, passing on any pertinent industry news, etc.). The talk was a re-run and update of a vintage session I last did at DCon 2000 and BorCon 2001, and the original conference papers are still available online through those links. Wow, those sessions were eleven and twelve years ago!

Anyway, since the last time I delivered this session there have been a whole heap of new Delphi versions so the main thrust of the session, a run-through a bunch of useful and time-saving keystrokes has now pretty much taken over the whole session.

The gist of the session was to point out that nowadays we have something of an attachment to our favourite pointing device, the mouse. The business of reaching for the mouse, moving the pointer to the right location and clicking can often be rather less efficient than coders of old that had no pointing device options and just rattled away on their keyboard. Making yourself more aware of some of the useful and convenient keystrokes can help make various processes more efficient in your Delphi coding life.

Most Delphi developers have a bunch of keystrokes under their belt, but there is always room for improvement, always an opportunity to pick up a few more helpful keyboard tricks.

During the session, whose content seemed to be lapped up by the Delphi developers there, I was asked if my keystroke list was available ass a document. Well, yes I had made a list of the more useful keystrokes to run through during the talk. I said I’d post them up on the blog here and that I will indeed do.

I am working through the list, adding some notes here and there to make the list more useful as a standalone item without my walking through it demonstrating it and putting things into context. So the list will be posted here some time over the next week, and I’ll come back to this post and add a link to it also.

So, apologies that this post is just a total tease, but the list itself is only partially useful until I’ve expanded it with some explanatory text. I’ll be back!

---

Update

As promised, I worked through the list and put in suitable context info for each of the items. You can find the keystroke list here.