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IntelliJ IDEA / Android Studio Tricks: Live Templates – Ivan Morgillo

IntelliJ IDEA / Android Studio Tricks: Live Templates


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One of my favorite features of IDEA are Live Templates. To give you a bit of context, Live Templates are those things you see appearing when you start typing in IDEA ๐Ÿ˜‚

OK OK, let’s be a bit more precise. If you are writing some Java code and you type foreach and then press TAB, the code that appears magically is a Live Template.

If you are writing some Kotlin code and you type main and then press TAB, that’s a Live Template. With Android, you can type logd and TAB and you get another Live Template.

Live Templates live in Preferences -> Editor

Default Android Live Templates

Create a Live Template

Creating a new LT is pretty straightforward:

go to Preference -> Editor -> Live Templates

To keep things well grouped I like to create a new group, using the โž• sign in the top-right corner:

New LiveTemplate Group

You can create a Live Template in this group now:

The abbreviation is the text we are gonna write to trigger the LT. One of my favorite custom LT on Android is tinder. It was born because I found myself writing Timber.d(...) over and over again and I thought:

I need a live template for this and I need it to make me smile when I use it!๐Ÿ˜ƒ

So I changed the abbreviation to tinder and added the Template Text:

Timber.d($MESSAGE$)

On the bottom-right you can select

and as context, you can select Kotlin:

Save and you are good to go! ๐Ÿ’ช๐Ÿป

Further details

If you look at existing LTs you will find that a lot them have multiple placeholders:

You can create as many as you need and you can edit them in the Edit Variable menu:

When you are using the LT, every variable will be a “jump” in the code where you can then type a value. You can even use IDE functions to retrieve fancy information to use here. Check out the documentation and play around until you build the Live Template that makes you smile ๐Ÿ˜ƒ

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