All IDE’s should have custom keybinding options. For years I’d lived under the thumb of JCreator and Notepad because all the shortcuts of the then-major (free) IDE’s were just ridiculous. I would never have guessed what the command for Save All was without a guide. And that’s what’s the most retarding: IDE’s are supposed to help you write code, not make you spend more time wondering how to do something than getting it done.
I jumped ship to Eclipse for Java development several years ago. It was Free, independent of Sun, and had a plugin architecture. It wasn’t until some errant day that I fortuitously pressed Ctrl+Shift+c to toggle a line comment. I was floored! Oh, rational and easy keyboard shortcuts, where had you been all my life?! I remember, tied up in some “Ctrl+Alt+x-tcomment” command. No longer!
Then, after I began really customizing Eclipse, right around Ganymede, I started tweaking the keybindings to just-suit my likings. I bound Ctrl+Alt+s to Save All, Ctrl+Alt+q to Close All, and Ctrl+Alt+r to Run. It was glorious. My high-school typing teacher told us that two hands on the keyboard will always be faster than a mouse. I’d have to amend that statement and say that it certainly is, for particular tasks. The key is to bind the right tasks to easy-access shortcuts, and you’ll never be beaten in a speed-test by a mouse-driven GUI.
Recently, I’ve again changed loyalties and moved to Netbeans. (Aside: Eclipse was wonderful, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for it, but the explosive memory usage and frequent hangings made it unusable.) It was a tough switch, though. I had tried several years before, and ran into what I considered a major usability problem: lack of multi-key bindings. By the time I was ready to switch, I was almost ready for Emacs. The fact that I could nest actions into multi-key-multi-mask shortcuts was downright awesome! By then, I’d had intimate exposure to SVN and couldn’t live without my Ctrl+t-Ctrl+c check-in binding; (“t” for “team”, “c” for “check-in”). It wasn’t until recently that I gave it another shot and am so thankful for the effort. I’ve discovered an entirely new realm of happiness for an IDE. Assigning and navigating bookmarks takes less than ten seconds and jumping to the declaration of a function to see the actual code, then right back to where you were is easy as Ctrl+d-Alt+Left!
Custom keybindings will save your life, or at least make you twice as productive. Learn them, use them, enjoy them.
Welcome to the Netbeans camp, I hope you enjoy your stay. I used to enjoy Visual Studio until I had to go back to it after Netbeans… Then the lack of ctrl+click navigation and comment out keyboard shortcuts made me learn to hate VS.