Basic Usage
The Wolfram Language Plugin is an extension for JetBrains IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, CLion, PyCharm, and others. Therefore, it’s vitally important you familiarize yourself with your IDE, because most features of the Wolfram Language plugin are incorporated directly into the IDE’s workflow and work consistently for all programming languages. You will find a lot of documentation on the official Jetbrains site and for a quick start you should start to
- read through the Quick Start you find in the official documentation
- skim at least once through the Keymap Shortcuts
- skim the Tip of the Day dialog which shows up when you open your IDE or click on Help | Tip of the Day
Before reading further, let me emphasize that to turn this into the ultimate experience, you have to engage
with the way JetBrains IDEs work.
This means that you have to refer to the shortcut keymap and this guide for some days until you’re comfortable
with the main features.
Everything in the IDE is organized in a way that you, generally speaking, won’t need your mouse from the moment
you’ve opened your IDE.
Therefore, the first thing I want you to do is to click on Help in the menu bar and print the Default Keymap Reference.
The short-cuts are similar on all systems, although on Mac OS X there are a few differences.
The biggest one is that the Cmd key is used when the other systems use Ctrl.
For the guide here, I will use the shortcuts for Linux and Windows which use Ctrl.
The Key Promoter X is a small plugin that helps you to discover and learn shortcuts of JetBrains IDEs quickly by providing information boxes whenever you click a button that has a keyboard shortcut.
Auto-completion
Highlighting and auto-completion is the first feature you will notice when you start to use the IDE. It is implemented in a way that it works without the need for a special shortcut. It will automatically pop up during typing and suggest function names or variables.
You have several ways to use one of the suggestions from the auto-completion window.
If you’re happy with the very first one, then just press Enter or better, use Ctrl+Shift+Enter.
The latter is called Smart Enter and does a lot of useful things in different situations.
In the case of auto-completing a function name like Plot, it will insert braces for you and place the cursor inside.
So when you type P3 and you’re happy with the ParametricPlot3D at the top of the suggestion list,
then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and you’re left with ParametricPlot3D[] and the cursor between the braces.
If the word you’re completing is not a function, like PlotRange, which is an option, Smart Enter will just insert the word without braces.
Note that you can use the up- and down-arrows to start navigating in the list of completion suggestions.
Usually, this is not necessary because with Camel Humps you can often specify the word uniquely.
By the way, camel humps are the upper cases letters in a long function name: For instance PP3D for ParametricPlot3D
or LLICP for ListLineIntegralConvolutionPlot.
In fact, you don’t have to specify every camel hump.
You can leave some of them out, and the IDE will still give you correct suggestions.
You can always invoke auto-completion manually (if you’ve e.g., pressed Esc to close the auto-completion popup)
by using Ctrl+Space.
If the completion window is already open, then you will see that the first entry will be highlighted:
the completion is selected just like when you use the arrow keys.
On such a selected entry in the completion list, you can open the documentation of the function using Ctrl+Q.
Opening documentation with Ctrl+Q works not only in the auto-completion pop-up.
You can invoke it for each symbol or even operator your cursor is currently over.
Try to write fun::myMsg = "Hello you" and use the shortcut when you’re next to the = or between ::.
The plugin comes with the documentation of all built-in functions and operators.
Back to how to use auto-completion: We’ve seen already you can use Enter to simply insert the completion and
Smart Enter (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) to do something more clever as it e.g., inserts braces for you.
There is a third option: the Tab key.
This is especially useful if you have a word right to your cursor, and you want to replace it with the current selection.
Let’s say you’ve written GridLinesStyle but you made a mistake because you wanted to have GridBoxSpacings.
Do the following, go directly between the letters d and L in GridLinesStyle and type BS.
When the correct suggestion pops up, press Tab and replace the rest of the word.
There are two more things that are extremely helpful.
The first is called Smart Completion and works only in specific places.
You can use it when you’re inside any function call like Plot[].
The shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+Space and you can use it to insert the specific options of a function.
This means, in the case of Plot[] and with the cursor inside the braces, after pressing Smart Completion all the
options of Plot[] will pop up, and you can simply insert them.
It’s even better, you can just start typing for instance Plot[x,{x,0,1},PR] and when you then press Smart Completion,
it will preselect the list of options and show only the ones that match the Camel Humps.
This Smart Completion will work similarly inside Message[],
only it will search your code for messages you’ve defined and show them as a suggestion.
Finally, sometimes even the clever auto-completion will not show the symbol you’ve defined anywhere
(I want to know if something like this happens!).
For those cases, there is an emergency auto-completion that can be invoked with Ctrl+Alt+Space.
This one will show you all symbol names you’ve used anywhere in the file.
If nothing helps, this one does.
Moving around
During coding, nothing is more annoying than taking the hand off the keyboard to use the mouse.
There are some keys you should remember because they probably spare you some of those mouse events.
First, holding Ctrl down and using left and right on the arrow keys lets you jump expression-wise.
If you’re inside a deeply nested construct, you can move with Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+] to jump to the beginning or
ending of the current scoping expression.
You can use Alt+Up/Down to jump between expressions at file-scope, which are usually the single function
definitions you made.
Holding Ctrl down while using the arrow keys for up and down lets you scroll the document without moving the cursor position.
If you want to navigate to a different file tab, you can use Alt and Left/Right.
Finally, with Ctrl+E you get the recent files dialog which lets you move through your current files easily.
Ctrl+Shift+E gives you the dialog where the files are sorted by edit time.
To switch to the project pane you can simply use Alt+1 and note that all the other panels can be accessed in the
same way using the appropriate number.
If you want to move back to the editor, just press Esc.
The Structure View can be accessed by using Alt+7.
Very important is, when you are in the Project View, the Structure View or in one of the Recent Files views,
you cannot only move around with the arrow keys, you can just start typing to search for a name.
Selecting Text
Selecting text works like usual by holding the Shift key and using the arrow keys or page-up and page-down.
One incredibly useful feature is the selection of increasing/decreasing expressions which can be invoked with
Ctrl+W and Ctrl+Shift+W.
The big advantage of this type of selection is that you’re often left with valid code if you cut the selection out,
and your braces are still balanced.
Additionally, you can use Ctrl+Shift+] to select until the closing brace of the function you’re currently in.
One very nice feature, once you have a selected code block, is the usage of Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down which will move
the whole selection block through your code.
This is extremely helpful if you want to re-arrange blocks of code.
Live Templates and Surround With
Live Templates are abbreviations for a bigger code construct, for instance, mdl followed by a Tab
key will insert a complete Module[{vars}, Null] with template positions vars and Null you can fill in.
To move between the template positions, just use Tab.
The Live Templates will appear in the auto-completion box too, together with a description of the template.
In general, we have tried to stay consistent and template abbreviations are the function names without the vowels:
mdl→Module, wth→With, tbl→Table etc.
The complete list can be found under Settings → Live Templates → Mathematica.
If you don’t believe how useful this is, then try usg and start typing the function name.
Another useful feature is Surround With which lets you surround a select portion of text with all kinds of things.
In Mathematica, you often want to surround an expression with another function.
This can now be done easily: Use Ctrl+W to select the expression you want to surround and then press
Ctrl+Shift+T and then Enter (or 1).
With this, it is easy to turn a larger portion of code into an anonymous function.
Structure View
The Structure View is one of the latest features.
In short, it gives you a direct and clean way to see all the definitions in your file.
It will extract function definitions, variable assignments, usage messages, setting of options and attributes, setting
of tags and upvalues and some more.
The Structure View can be turned on with Alt+7 and you have several ways to adjust its behavior.
First, you should use the small gear-wheel icon to turn on the Toolbar.
There, you can (from left to right) sort all assignments in the structure tree by name or by line number.
Furthermore, you can group the entries by the type of the assignment (:=, =, Options, Attributes, etc.) or by name.
The other buttons are for expanding and collapsing the group nodes and for synchronizing the Structure View with the
cursor position in the file.
In a highly complex source file, the Structure View is very helpful to find definitions.
Remember that you can search all visible nodes in the Structure View simply by starting to type.
Expanding the nodes can be done with Ctrl++ and collapsing with Ctrl+- which is (again) faster than taking the
hand off the keyboard and using the mouse.