Android Studio Tips and Tricks
Master the hidden gems of Android Studio to improve the speed of your development with these Android Development tips and tricks. By Kevin D Moore.
Learning path
This is part of the Android IDEs & Tools learning path. View path.
Who is this for?
From beginners to advanced users who are interested in speeding up their development. The user should be familiar with Android development.
Covered concepts
- Plugins
- Editing
- Navigation
- Refactoring
- Live Templates
Part 1: Code Refactoring
Learn how to convert older Java code to Kotlin using Android Studio, compare and show more code on a screen by splitting your screen horizontally or vertically and how to add actions on the Toolbar.
Learn how to rename files, fields, methods or classes. Rename a variable once and it will be changed through out your project. Discover how to Change Method Signatures: Change parameters and return types.
Learn how to extract variables, methods, and parameters and easily create variables and methods from repeated code.
Trim down your bloated app by getting rid of unused files: find images that are no longer used and make your app smaller.
Stay up to date by learning how to convert your project and migrate to Androidx.
Part 2: Using Android Studio to Navigate Your Codebase
Learn how to search through all of your files easily for any kind of text. Search in your whole project, a specific directory or a module. Use regular expressions or just match on case or by word.
In this episode learn how to navigate back and forth between files by showing a popup of your most recently used files. Also, discover how to use keyboard shortcuts to show the current classes methods and properties.
Use this keyboard shortcut to search actions in addition to files. If you have to remember one command, this is it.
With this keyboard shortcut you can search for all usages of a method. This is one of the more helpful commands as you can find where a method is being used throughout your code.
Part 3: Mastering the Android Studio Editor
Learn how to easily move, duplicate and delete lines and methods. Edit the same word on multiple lines.
Use Android Studio to help fix your code. With Quick Fix, Android Studio will suggest solutions to your problems.
Reformat either your selection or the whole file to match your code style with a quick shortcut: learn various different ways of formatting code.
If you ever need to work on different problems with a different set of files, contexts will allow you to save many different sets.
Part 4: Plugins: Power-Ups for Android Studio
Install this plugin to help you become a keyboard Ninja: learn how using menus causes a hint to show how you would call this command using the keyboard.
Learn how to use this plugin to create Kotlin data classes from JSON. If you already have examples of the data you receive, you can easily create all your model classes.
Part 5: Miscellaneous Tricks
Learn what templates are and how to use current Kotlin templates. Then, learn how to create your own templates and which variables you can use.
Learn how to review and restore past changes to a file. Local History can be a life-safer: if you've ever accidentally reverted a file or changed it, Local History will show all the changes made to the file and allow you to put back any previous changes.