18 years ago today Delphi 1 was launched as a revolutionary way of building native compiled, unmanaged, non-interpreted 16-bit Windows 3 applications using UI-driven RAD principles.
Today Delphi targets Win32, Win64, OS X and at some point soon will also target iOS and Android.
Happy birthday Delphi!
Delphi has come a long way in 18 years, but the basic principles of building Windows applications are just the same today as they were then. The VCL library has expanded and grown considerably, and the IDE has had countless useful features and options added to it over the years.
It’s easy to miss some of the IDE features or forget a useful keystroke. To help you remember some of the more useful ones, please refer to any of these resources:
- My blog post Delphi IDE productivity keystrokes from July 2012 where I run through some of my favourite IDE keystrokes, mainly in the code editor.
- My CodeRage 7 session IDE Productivity Tips & Techniques from November 2012 where I demonstrate some of my favourite IDE keystrokes, mainly in the code editor.
- Cary Jensen’s Delphi Editor (Updated) Key Combination Table. I spent quite some time working with Cary on this (hopefully) comprehensive “cheat sheet” of keystrokes available from the Delphi editor’s default keymapping. It’s a big list and many of the supported functions are accessible through more than one keystroke combination, which makes the list even longer. If you want to find how to do something in the editor with a keystroke shortcut, this is the resource to refer to.
Note that the online Delphi keystroke documentation is unfortunately deficient and errant in various regards. I made a concerted effort to correct those oversights in this updated shortcut collection.
Keep using Delphi for your native Windows applications and we’ll still be celebrating Delphi’s birthday for many years to come!