Tutorial: Features and Hotkeys in Quorum Studio

Features and Hotkeys in Quorum Studio

Development Environments often have many helpful features available that help us interact with code online, edit our documents, or run the source code or scenes we are creating. In this tutorial, we will go over the major features available and the hotkeys we can use to access them from the keyboard. Not every user needs all of these features, but knowing they exist is helpful in learning what is possible inside of a computer programming environment. This document covers only the default settings.

File Menu (ALT + F)

The file menu helps us in creating, opening, and closing a Quorum project in Quorum Studio.

Edit Menu (ALT + E)

The edit menu helps us in using the text editor, including undoing and redoing edits in our program. It also includes a way to access properties for our projects, which can change how Quorum creates our software. For example, we can open the properties window, ask Quorum to automatically fix certain kinds of errors in our code, or turn on code completion, which is a pop-up menu that shows us information about the code we are writing. Common hotkeys we may want to memorize are for hint usage, ALT + ENTER, undo/redo keys like CTRL or CMD + C/Z, and those for code completion, CTRL + SPACE. Each of these is useful for learning to code and working in practice.

View Menu (ALT + V)

The view menu has largely two features. The first is zoom, which scales up the environment while trying to keep it readable. Second, there are two accessibility keys, one to ask the system to summarize the current state of the component we are in and another, where am I, that tries to give location information about a component. Not all components have these keys hooked up, but they can provide context and information specifically to screen reader users.

Navigate Menu (ALT + N)

This menu provides access to navigating around in specifically the text editor. Notably, there are several keys that help us logically navigate source code. These include keys to jump to the next action, keys to jump to or back to the next or previous scope, keys to move to the end or beginning of the file, and keys to move to the next status message in the gutter. This menu also gives us access to a Go To dialog, which lets us jump to a line of code, and a jump to feature that we can use on specific lines of code to logically jump to a library in Quorum Source.

Run Menu (ALT + R)

The run menu contains hotkeys for running, debugging, and building Quorum code. Generally, building and running code is so common that these keys may be worth memorizing. Besides running and debugging, there are keys included here to send code to an android device and to change where a program starts running from.

Team Menu (ALT + T)

The team menu allows projects versioned under the Git version control system to be used directly from within Quorum Studio. By default, each hotkey allows us to query for information, which is placed into Quorum's console. For example, we can request the status of our current version, commit code to our local system, pull code from a server on github.com or bitbucket.com, or push our code to the remote system. We strongly encourage any group doing team projects to adopt these features and use them. Other version control systems, like mercurial, subversion, or others are not supported.

Window Menu (ALT + W)

The windows menu provides hotkeys for navigating around the windows of Quorum Studio with the keyboard. Two common keys to know are F6 and SHIFT + F6, which move to the next window in a sequence of windows. Besides these, we recommend knowing at least the keys to move between the tree (CTRL + 0 on PC or CMD + 0 on Mac) and the project tree (CTRL + 1 on PC or CMD + 1 on Mac).

Help Menu (ALT + H)

The help menu does not have any hotkeys, but contains two options, an about window that says the version number for Quorum Studio and the Check for Updates item. Check for updates, for Quorum Studio version 2.0 or higher, will automatically update itself to the next version.

Next Tutorial

In the next tutorial, we will discuss types, which describes how to use primitive data types.