Tips and Tricks that would improve your skills as an Android Developer
Here are the best Tips and tricks that would Improve your skills and speed as an Android developer
Visual
- Material Colors theme for Android Logcat
To change Android Studio Logcat you need to go to: Preferences (Settings on Windows / Linux machines) → Editor → Color Scheme → Android Logcat and change the foreground color for every type of log. You need to also uncheck an option Inherit values from: Console -> Error output.
My material colors:
- Assert
#BA68C8 - Debug
#2196F3 - Error
#F44336 - Info
#4CAF50 - Verbose
#BBBBBB - Warning
#FF9800
2. Prevent Android Studio Logcat from clearing the log for the current application when it crashes.
To do that you need to go to the Android Monitor panel and choose Edit filter configuration on the right side dropdown.
3. Apply a proper code style to your IDE (IntelliJ / Android Studio).
Go to Preferences → Code Style → Java and in a Scheme dropdown you can choose your code style (or set up a new one).
styles that are especially worth mentioning:
- Square Java Code Styles with Android
- Google Java Code Style
You can import the theme as shown in the gif below:
If you work with Kotlin, I recommend using the Kotlin style guide from the Predefined Style option. To change that go to:Code Style -> Kotlin -> Set from… -> Predefined Style -> Kotlin style guide
4. Use a split screen for increasing efficiency.
To turn this feature on, you need to right-mouse-click on the tab of your main screen and choose Split Vertically / Horizontally feature.
But to be as efficient as possible we need to set up a custom keyboard shortcut. To do that go to Preferences → Keymap and search for Split Vertically. Then open a context menu and click Add Keyboard Shortcut.
In my case, for the vertical split view, I added control + alt + v.
It is shown in a gif below. You can define the shortcut for a horizontal split view as well.
IDE Performance Recommendations
5 Disable unused plugins
Preferences → Plugins
According to this Jake Wharton comment, plugins can be extremely useful, but they also noticeably slow down Android Studio. I recommend looking through all your plugins and disabling any you don’t need. For example, I have never used Mercurial or Subversion for version control in my life, so I can safely disable the plugins for them.
6 Increase IDE max heap size
Preferences → Appearance & Behavior → System Settings → Memory Settings → Select IDE max heap size from dropdown
Android Studio requires a lot of RAM to run smoothly. If you’re getting frustrated with a laggy editor, it’s probably because the default 1280MB heap size is too small for your development. I recommend bumping it up to the 2048MB — 4096MB range, depending on how much RAM your computer has.
7 Keyboard Shortcuts + Productivity Guide
Help -> Productivity Guide
I recommend taking some time to learn Android Studio’s built-in keyboard shortcuts if you haven’t already. The full list can be found here
Android Studio also provides a productivity guide that displays a list of actions that you use often and the shortcuts associated with them. It’s a fun way to see how much time you’ve saved with shortcuts and learn new ones to save even more time.
That’s it! Please let me know about your useful tips & tricks or resources.
