Keyboard Shortcuts Every Game Developer Should Know (With Bonus Godot-specific Shortcuts)

in this video i'm going to walk you through some of the best keyboard shortcuts that any game developer should know to help code faster i'm going to be showing all of these shortcuts on mac but i'll also include the windows keys so that if you're on windows you can use them as well towards the end of the video i'm going to show some godot specific hotkeys so that if you're a godot developer you can use them to really speed up and improve your godot workflow let's get started the first shortcut that we're going to look at is tab and shift tab now you've probably used tab tons of times throughout your life but a lot of people don't know that you can actually use shift tab to tab the other way so if i hit tab it'll move forward and if i shift tab it'll go back one of the cool things about shift tab in many languages is that you don't actually need to it's not position dependent so i can shift tab anywhere in the line and i will move the whole line back a tab now you can't really do that with tab this is a little bit godot specific but it's common in a lot of word processing and editors but so shift tab is a great way to move things forward and back and you can also do it with multiple lines at a time so see here if i select multiple lines it doesn't matter where they're selected if i tab all of them will move forward and if i shift tab all of them will move backwards and this is true for vs code and lots of other popular editors so tab and shift tab are very helpful when you're trying to move blocks of code or blocks of words forward and backwards at the same time the next hotkey is command c or command x which is ctrl c or control x and you might be thinking i've used this for the entirety of my life and you probably have but the thing i wanted to show is that you don't actually need to select the line if you want to copy a line so instead of having to if i wanted to copy line 42 here instead of having to copy the whole thing and hit command c i can actually just hit command c if i don't have anything selected and my cursor is on the line command c and if i do command v it'll paste the whole line so if you don't select anything you can copy the entire line and that works for cutting as well without needing to select the entire line okay and now we're going to get into the really cool stuff which is option plus left or right and on windows this is control and left or right and what this does is it lets you move not just one character left or right if i'm pressing the left and right arrow keys but if i hold option while i do this or control on windows and hit option left to right i'll move backwards and forwards an entire word so it'll let you traverse a word at a time instead of just a character at a time this is a really great way to navigate between words on the same line when you're trying to change multiple things on a line it's a super super helpful key to know option left to right or control left to right this also applies if you hold down the shift key at the same time so option shift left or right will let you select whole entire words with just one keystroke and having instead of having to do shift and left and right all the way to the end of the line so option left and right and control left and right the next key the next hotkey and this is truly one of the ones i use all the time is option up or down or on windows it's all left or down and what this does is it lets you move the current line that you're on up or down so if i hit option and go up it'll move line 42 up and it'll switch it with line 41. so now 42 has become 41 and vice versa so it doesn't delete but it switches and if i hit option down it'll move that line back to where it used to so option up and down are super helpful because it'll let you move lines without having to like copy one and then print it and then get rid of the other line it's way quicker to just do this now you can't do this in godot but in many code editors if you hold option shift up or down or alt shift up or down it will copy this line into the next one so it would be like doing command c and then doing this if i hit option shift up or option shift down again i can't really show that in godot but option up or down or all up or down is an incredible incredibly important and useful cocky to know this next hotkey is somewhat max specific but there are ways to copy it on a windows and that is command left or right now what this does is it moves you to the beginning or end of a line so command left beginning of the line command right end of the line and it is smart about knowing tabs or white space at the beginning of a line so you'll see it doesn't take me all the way to the end but it actually just takes me to the smart place which is at the beginning of the actual characters on the line now on windows again you can't really do this because control left and right go for a single word so it doesn't really work the same but you can hit home to go to the beginning of the line and end to go to the end of the line on windows so it's somewhat of the same you're still able to keep on your keyboard without having to use your cursor but it is a nice thing about mac that you can just use command left or right to go to the beginning or end of a line okay so those are just a few really basic but incredibly helpful and important hotkeys to know if you're working in code or even in word processors you'll find that these work on google chrome on an internet browser in microsoft word and really any program but it's especially true if you're staring at code all day and working and doing programming and having to move bunches of text around all day now that we've covered those we're going to move into the godot specific section and the first one that i want to point out is command k and i believe it is control k on windows and what command k does is it comments out a line so if i select line 42 and hit command k all of a sudden it gets commented out i can hit command k to reverse this as well now in a lot of non or other programs that aren't godot you can do this like in vs code you can do command uh forward slash i believe now that that's not a high key in godot but like in vs code in many editors command slash will let you comment out a line and you can select multiple lines and do this so even in godot if i select these three lines and hit command k it'll comment all of them out command k again will uncomment them all super helpful if you just need to comment out a big section of code at a time but don't want to go through and actually comment them out and write the hashtag on all of them this next hotkey involves using the scene tree in godot and here you see a preview of my text retro text adventure tutorial series that i've got coming out so if this looks interesting or you're interested in making a retro text adventure you should definitely check out that video but we'll just use kind of this background for this so this hotkey involves actually running your good your godot game from your from with a hotkey so you can run your godoto game by hitting this button up here and you can run your current scene by hitting this button here but you'll see the hotkeys on these command b and command r to run your entire game from your main scene or command r to run your current scene so if i've got a bunch of other scenes here but i want to run this specific scene this the parent of what i'm currently looking at which is this text adventure demo i can hit command r to run just this scene and you'll see here we are and i can type now i've got a completely different scene set as my main scene here and so if i come to this text adventure demo and hit command b we'll see our main scene is actually what gets run which is a totally different scene and so there you go command b and command r to run your entire game or to run your current scene respectively are super helpful to know in godot and prevent you from having to keep mousing up to the corner up here every time you want to run something to finish off we're gonna go over three incredibly important hotkeys for working with the scene tree in godot and they are command a which is adding a new node command d which duplicates the currently selected node and command backspace which deletes the currently selected node so say if i come down here and i've got my carrot right here say i want to add a picture to this well if i want to add a texture rect i could come up to this plus button and find it in here but that's kind of a hassle when i could just hit command a and pop that window up by itself and then i can search and add a texture rector button or whatever i want so command a will open up a open up the add node dialog and notice that if i add one it's a child of the currently selected node so because i had carrot selected it automatically adds it as a child of that node so i'll get rid of this now even this is a good example of how i can delete a node instead of right clicking on this node and finding delete somewhere in this big branch and it's down at the bottom you'll see that there's actually a hotkey here command backspace so if i select this and hit command backspace i'll be able to delete it and then i can just hit enter and i'm able to delete something and navigate the scene tree without ever having to touch my mouse or trackpad which is very convenient now the next thing that's really helpful is duplicating a node oftentimes if you have a scene and you want to duplicate it or populate it a bunch of times in your game you're going to want to duplicate it a lot and you can just select it and right click and hit duplicate but it's much faster to just use this command d shortcut so let's say i want to have an extra carrot here well i can just hit command d and then there's going to be two and i can keep doing it over and over and over again and you can't really see it now because they're all children of this panel container but i can add as many i can just keep duplicating the same nodes over and over again with command d and if i select all these i can hit command backspace to delete collective nodes hit enter and just like that so these are just some really simple basic hotkeys and shortcuts about using godot the engine the code editor and just navigating the scene tree that will dramatically help improve and make your workflow faster it's just easier and it helps you become more familiar with the engine and you're just able to be more productive so anyway thanks so much for watching i hope this video has been helpful and that you felt like you've learned some useful hotkeys and shortcuts to make your programming workflow better if it has a like and subscribe to support the channel are always appreciated we'd love to have you in our discord server the link to that is in the description and if you found my work helpful you can donate a coffee and buy me a coffee and that helps me continue to make great tutorials for free thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: jmbiv

Views: 845

Keywords: godot, unity, keyboard, keyboard shortcuts, keyboard shortcut keys, keyboard shortcut keys windows 10, keyboard shortcut keys mac, godot shortcuts, unity shortcuts, vscode shortcuts, programming shortcuts, programming keyboard shortcuts, shortcuts, programming, game development, game dev, godot engine, unity engine, unity hotkeys, godot hotkeys, keyboard shortcuts windows 10, keyboard shortcuts mac, code shortcuts, gamedev, game development tutorial, programming tips

Id: q5YXZZ8LjLo

Length: 10min 6sec (606 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/esperlihn]

I'm literally only 2 minutes in and you've already blown my mind twice. Thank you SO FUCKING MUCH FOR THIS!!