Resize (tool) windows with keyboard
Since IntelliJ IDEA is so much loved by keyboard addicts, here is a tiny yet helpful feature introduced in version 9.0.2: you can change size of a tool window by means of your keyboard.
Say, you’re doing “find usages”, the tool window is popping up and it’s too small for you to comfortably look at the usages tree. Now you don’t have to grab a mouse to stretch it up, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Up (Meta-Shift-Up for Mac users) and your tool window is getting bigger.
So, if you need to resize a tool window: focus it (by Alt-number or Ctrl-Tab) and then use Ctrl-Shift plus an arrow key that points to the direction you want.
You can also use these arrow shortcuts to resize dialogs and actually any window that IntelliJ IDEA shows. Say, you opened the project structure dialog and it’s too narrow for you. Use Ctrl-Shift-Right and Ctrl-Shift-Down to make it bigger.
Kjetil says:
January 25, 2010Nice. But when exactly is 9.0.2 coming?
Marcus Brito says:
January 25, 2010Now you just need to make sure keyboard focus isn’t jumping around convulsively or disappearing completely 🙂
Kirill Kalishev says:
January 25, 2010Marcus, could you be more specific?
Dan Lewis says:
January 25, 2010Tried it, didn’t work, then realized that 9.0.1 doesn’t have this feature, and so I thought, hey great, 9.0.2 must be out! But it’s not. Do I need to go over to EAP to get this feature?
Kirill Kalishev says:
January 25, 2010Dan, Kjetil: you can have it now as a community edition build — http://www.jetbrains.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=983225
An official 9.0.2 release is a matter of a few weeks.
Geoffrey De Smet says:
January 26, 2010Has there been any progress against the focus stealing issue?
http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-27887
Cristian Vasile Mocanu says:
January 26, 2010Hi Kirill,
Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down is already mapped to the (much more useful) “Move statements Up/Down”. Veteran IntelliJ users (like me) probably use Ctrl+Shift+Up/Down a lot to rearrange statements.
You might want to change the keyboard shortcuts for this new feature to something else…
What do you say about using the numpad arrows instead? E.g.: Ctrl+Numpad 4/6/2/8
Best regards,
Cristian
Kon Soulianidis says:
January 27, 2010This is great, i hate reaching for the mouse.
@Cristian, I think the use case is for when focus is given to a-non editor window. Those shortcuts wont work if you aren’t in the editor. If you are in the editor window, the first thing you would do is select the tab first (CTRL+TAB or ALT+number), then use those keys to resize. But of course I agree that consideration should be given so they dont accidentally remove functionality from these tabs by way of clashing shortcuts.
Should give the EAP build a try to see how functional this is in practice, whether this will lead to accidentally moving statements.
Kirill Kalishev says:
January 27, 2010Cristian, thank you, this makes sense
Kirill Kalishev says:
January 27, 2010Geoffrey, yes, we are to finally fix this soon.
Geoffrey De Smet says:
January 28, 2010Wonderfull!
Anton Shumanski says:
June 8, 2015This functionality(CTRL+SHIFT+UP/DOWN) it doesn’t work when you working in terminal tab 🙁
Andrey Cheptsov says:
June 10, 2015You can mention it at https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-116221 (a related issue) or create a new one
Gregory Schier says:
May 4, 2016In the settings (tools > terminal) you have to uncheck the “Override IDE shortcuts” box.
Sam says:
April 10, 2017Thanks a ton!
Dominic C Nunes says:
April 29, 2016Can I resize split editor panes with the keyboard?
Andrey Cheptsov says:
April 29, 2016No, you can only resize tool windows via keyboard.
mgershen says:
April 6, 2017you can with a plugin called “Tab Shifter”
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29087912/how-to-resize-splitter-in-phpstorm