Quorum Studio Tips

On this page, we discuss software development features available in the offline development environment for Quorum, Quorum Studio. This includes shortcuts and ideas for helping us understand and work with source code. Using all of these features is optional, although our development team finds them helpful and we hope you will too. For example, keep in mind that in computer science, source code written in a plain text editor will ultimately do the same thing after being compiled, but we as humans use development tools to help us invent things more quickly.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The Quorum Studio programming environment, by default, has a wide variety of keyboard shortcuts available to the user. These shortcuts vary by operating system and can be customized by preference. In this section, we discuss some of the more common ones.

Navigation Shortcuts

When navigating, there are a variety of shortcuts that can assist in getting from place to place. The most common of these are as follows.

This section includes a variety of new hotkeys for keyboard navigation in the editor. There are many more hotkeys other than those listed here, but these can be useful.

Compilation Shortcuts

This section includes a variety of new hotkeys for keyboard navigation in the editor. There are many more hotkeys other than those listed here, but these are particularly useful.

Debugging Shortcuts

We often want to stop a running program in its tracks, inspect what it is doing, and then make changes to our source code to fix bugs or add features. The controls for debugging and their keyboard shortcuts are named below and their purpose is described.

Development Environment Features

This section provides a basic list of features that the development environment for Quorum supports and their broad purpose. Using these features is optional.

Code Completion

Many modern development environments, including the one for Quorum, has a feature that is often called code completion. Code completion is a pop-up window that provides information about the source code. It used to determine the kinds of actions, variables, or other attributes of the object we can interact with.

This is an image of code completion inside of a skybox game application.

Coloring, Highlighting, and Folding

This image shows an example of the coloring and highlighting features in Quorum Studio. Notably, there are several kinds of colors. Blue indicates keywords, purple indicates matched keywords (e.g., if and end), green indicates field variables, and a orange indicates text. The keyboard shortcuts above allow us to quickly navigate between the items.

This is an image of source code highlighting

Editor Hints

Sometimes when we program, we make errors. At other times, the programming language we are using can detect aspects of the program we are writing and provide us with suggestions. For example, one common error is to "forget" (or not know) where a library lives on our system. Consider the class Drawable in the following image. If we were to type Drawable and then a variable name, Quorum can detect that there is a class called Drawable in the standard library and provide us a suggestion to fix it automatically. In other words, it is not necessary to memorize all of the locations for classes in the standard library, as Quorum can figure it out on its own. The hotkey for this is ALT + ENTER.

This is an image of the system showing a popup menu with an editor hint at the top. The hint indicates a use statement can be added.