Multi-caret in Android Studio

Knowing keyboard shortcuts is important. They save you time and help you achieve more in less time. If you need convincing, I highly recommend watching ‘Mouseless Driven Development’ by Hadi Hariri.

This blog post is about one such feature of Android Studio (or any JetBrains IDE for that matter) which not a lot of people know about — multi-caret selection. A lot of my friends and colleagues who I pair-program with feel amazed by it and always ask “What was that!?”, so I decided to write about it to help them and everyone out there know about these.

Why use it? Because sometimes you need to replace just a few instances of a word/pattern and find & replace is not very useful.

Alt + J / Control + G (Select next occurrence)

Select next occurrence of the currently selected text. If no text is selected, the current word with cursor is selected.

Alt + Shift + J / Control +Shift + G (Unselect current occurrence)

Unselect current occurrence of selected text.

Alt + Shift + Ctrl + J / Control + Command + G (Select all occurrences)

Select all occurrences of the word in current file

Alt + click & scroll / Option + click & scroll (Multiple cursors in column)

Select a column of text in current file

Alt + Shift + clicks / Option + Shift + clicks (Spawn caret at click position)

Spawn carets across file at click position, even in the same word.

Hope it helps!

Originally posted on Medium link