Effective PyCharm Transcripts
Chapter: Why PyCharm and IDEs?
Lecture: How do you learn all the features of an IDE?

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0:03 If you're new to PyCharm, this picture is probably super overwhelming, there's so many windows and so many things happening in those windows,
0:13 kind of obscured in the middle, there some kind of editor that probably we know what it is, and there are all these project stuff,
0:18 and if you were to right click on something in the project, it would fill the screen with options; down at the bottom we have 5 or 6 tool windows
0:26 on the right we have database stuff, we have these configurations, and that doesn't even touch on things like using Vagrant
0:32 to manage virtual machines, oh my goodness. So, there's just so many things to learn in order to be effective with PyCharm
0:40 and IDEs in general, this is not specific to PyCharm, these tools that do tons of stuff, they're really hard to remember
0:47 all the things that you can do with them and if you don't use them to full advantage,
0:52 then they're not nearly as valuable to you as maybe just a simple editor, so you have to really commit to learning all of these little features
1:01 at least let's say 80%. How do you do it? How do you go through and you learn all of these things? I'm going to give you a concrete set of techniques
1:09 that more or less I use for myself and you can use as well. It comes down to— you need to discover what the features are
1:17 and well done, you're taking this course, so you're going to discover a whole bunch of them.
1:22 Even outside of this course, you need to discover what the features are and does that feature have a hotkey
1:29 and under what context can use it, things like this. And then, more importantly, more challengingly,
1:35 you need to recall actually, "Oh yeah, there was this feature, and it was awesome and here's the hotkey,"
1:41 like how do I remember to do that? You need to practice it. I'm going to propose a couple of things you can do, take it or leave it,
1:47 but I think this will help you a lot. So, three things— there is going to be a cheat sheet that you can use,
1:53 that has most of the common features as hotkeys, so you can figure out what those features are, how you want to use them and so on.
2:03 Throughout this course, to help you understand the hotkeys I'm using while I'm using the tool I am going to use something called presentation assistant
2:11 but presentation assistant is not just good for me, it's good for you, you'll see as you interact with PyCharm, it will tell you what that command was
2:17 and what the hotkeys that would trigger it would be, which is really awesome, so you'll be able to use that to learn it throughout this course
2:25 but it will always remind you as you interact with PyCharm, "Oh yeah, there is actually a keystroke I could do
2:31 to do the thing, just click on it in the menu." And finally, it comes down to sticky notes. So discover really comes down to cheat sheet
2:39 and a little bit of presentation assistant, I'd say presentation assistant more is in the recall, right you know there's a thing, you click on it,
2:45 "Oh yeah, there's the command, there's a hotkey," and then sticky note, so here's what I propose you do:
2:50 I'll show you the cheap sheet in just a second, you go to the cheat sheet or you write down things from this course
2:56 that you really want to try and you really want to make sure you learn and you get a stack of sticky notes, and you write down one action,
3:02 one hotkey, one thing that you want to learn on a single sheet and you write down as many as you want, 20, 50, 100 whatever it is.
3:11 And every week, you put one of those on your monitor, in the corner of your monitor. Today, I'm going to make sure I use this hot key,
3:20 I use this technique when I am say running unit tests, or whatever it is that you're trying to practice.
3:26 Maybe put a couple and pick one off every day, I don't know. But write them now and put them up
3:31 and make a concerted effort to practice and practice and practice. If you just do it for a few days it will totally stick,
3:38 especially with things like presentation assistant to bring it back. So let's go see this cheat sheet.
3:43 First of all, we have a github repository for the course, here it is github.com/mikeckennedy/mastering-pycharm-course
3:50 and it will probably look different, because throughout this course I'm going to put everything I write and all the things I dig up for you,
3:56 I'm going to put them in here, for you. So there will be more stuff by the time I get through recording this course,
4:03 but right now, we go to the beginning you can see on the readme there's a JetBrains PyCharm cheat sheet and they call it a reference card.
4:10 If we click this, you can see there is tons of stuff here so notice that there's a Windows and Linux version
4:22 and there is a Mac version, pick your version, but they're just basically the corresponding hotkeys for that OS.
4:29 There's a bunch of stuff to do with editing, like show completion, show the auto complete window when it's not there
4:34 so control space, we'll use that a ton. Command p, show the parameters, I'm in a method and I forgot what the arguments are,
4:43 hit command p and it will tell you exactly what goes where and what type they are and so on. All of these are amazing features, we'll talk about them
4:50 but you've got to somehow remember these, there are tons, I don't know how many are here
4:55 but there is probably at least 50 maybe 80 of them, I'm not sure but there's a lot of things here.
5:01 So what I'm proposing is you write one of these down, you pick these off and you basically put them on a sticky note and put them up on your monitor
5:08 and you make a concerted effort to use that for a couple of days, throw that sticky sheet away, get the next one and just keep going with it.
5:16 Eventually, they will all totally stick. This is really good for the discovery on what you can do,
5:21 "Oh look, there's a hotkey to show the parameter info, cool, maybe I'll start trying to play with that."
5:26 The other thing is— this presentation assistant, so let's come back here to snake_bnb, it doesn't really matter
5:33 and we'll just go down here, let's go here. Up here into the code window, there's a reformat code and it does technically have the command here,
5:42 alright, but if I click reformat code, notice down here reformat code here's the hotkey on Mac and here it is on Windows.
5:48 Also, you'll see me just hit the hotkey and it will show reformat code or maybe I want to go to the definition of let's say a booking,
5:57 I could hit command b, how do I know— well, in the beginning, I would use something right click and
6:04 let's see, there's go to over here go to declaration, I click this and oh, right here, presentation assistant is showing me.
6:12 So this is the plugin you can get for PyCharm, I'll show you real quick where you can get it,
6:17 we'll talk more about these at the end, but if you go over here to the settings, you just type plugins and you click this browse repositories,
6:25 and you type presentation assistant, you'll find it right there, you can install it, it's free, easy to use.
6:33 Basically it shows these pop-ups every time you do an action, whether you do it from here, which would show what the menu option is
6:41 as well as what the hotkey is, so no matter whether you use the menu, a hotkey, a toolbar button
6:48 it's always showing you what the name of that feature is and basically how to discover it, and what the hotkey,
6:53 which is really important to be effective, what that is. So, definitely install the presentation assistant, I use it all the time, it's good for me,
7:02 but it's also good for any time I am doing a presentation course, but I think it's actually good for learning.
7:08 So back here, use the cheat sheet to discover what is available, use presentation assistant to help you recall
7:14 that those features are there and what the hotkeys are and make some sticky notes for the things that really seem valuable to you
7:19 and put it up and make a concerted effort to practice that thing that's on your monitor for that day or that week.


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