Useful Android Studio plugins
Android Studio is a fully-featured IDE built by JetBrains and Google that has all that you need for writing an application. But you always can enhance your IDE with an endless list of plugins.
The right plugins can help make your work more efficient, smarter, and faster. I create a list of my favorite plugins that I use for my work and personal projects.
Let’s dive in!
Vim emulation plugin for Android Studio. IdeaVim supports many Vim features including normal/insert/visual modes, motion keys, deletion/changing, marks, registers, some Ex commands, Vim regexps, configuration via ~/.ideavimrc, macros, Vim plugins, etc.
AceJump allows you to quickly navigate the caret to any position visible in the editor. See a demo of AceJump in action! Simply hit “ctrl+;”, type a character, then type the matching character to Ace Jump. For example if you type get on.
Press the AceJump shortcut a second time to activate Declaration Mode, which is equivalent to the Navigate To action in the IDE. Press the AceJump shortcut three times before completing a tag to activate Target Mode. Once Target Mode is activated, jumping to a tag will select an entire word. Target Mode can also be activated directly by pressing the shortcut for AceTargetAction (Ctrl+Alt+; by default).
Press the AceJump shortcut for Line Mode(Ctrl+Shift+; by default), to target the beginning, first non-whitespace, and last character of every line in the editor). Then jump to one by completing the tag.
ADB Idea is a plugin for Android Studio and Intellij IDEA that speeds up the usual android development. It allows shortcuts for various emulator functionalities that are normally very time consuming, like resetting the app data, uninstalling the app, or initializing the debugger. The following commands are provided:
- ADB Uninstall App
- ADB Kill App
- ADB Start App
- ADB Restart App
- ADB Clear App Data
- ADB Clear App Data and Restart
- ADB Start App With Debugger
- ADB Restart App With Debugger
- ADB Grant/Revoke Permissions
- ADB Enable/Disable Wi-Fi
- ADB Enable/Disable Mobile Data
This plugin helps to get rid of USB cable and test your app on the device through WI-FI connection.
Rainbow Brackets adds rainbow brackets and rainbows parentheses to the code. Color coding the brackets makes it simpler to obtain paired brackets so that the developers don’t get lost in a sea of identical brackets. This is a very helpful tool and saves the confusion of selecting which bracket needs to be closed. Each pair of brackets/parentheses has a different color. Pretty simple, but an excellent plugin.
Similar to Sublime or Xcode, this plugin embeds a code minimap in your editor. The scrollbar gets a little bigger too. Codeglance previews your file’s code pattern, letting you quickly navigate to the desired section.
Very handy tool to manipulate strings. You can do things like case switching, sorting, filtering, incrementing, aligning to columns, grepping, escaping, encoding…
Features:
Case switching:
- Switch case (camelCase, kebab-lowercase, KEBAB-UPPERCASE, snake_case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, dot.case, words lowercase, First word capitalized, Words Capitalized, PascalCase)
- Toggle: SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE / camelCase
- Toggle: snake_case / camelCase
- Toggle: kebab-case / snake_case
- Toggle: kebab-case / camelCase
- Toggle: dot.case / camelCase
- Toggle: PascalCase / camelCase
- Toggle: lowercase words / camelCase
- Toggle: First word capitalized / camelCase
- Toggle: Capitalized Words / camelCase
- To camelCase
- To snake_case
- To SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE
- Capitalize
- To lower case
- To UPPER CASE
- Invert case
Encode/Decode:
- Encode selected text to MD5 Hex
- Encode selected text to SHA-1 Hex
- Encode selected text to SHA-256 Hex
- Encode selected text to SHA-512 Hex
- Encode selected text to SHA3–256 Hex
- Encode selected text to SHA3–512 Hex
- De/Encode selected text as URL
- De/Encode selected text to Base64 (+ zip/deflate)
- De/Encode selected text to Hex
- ISO Timestamp to Epoch Milliseconds
- Epoch Milliseconds to ISO Timestamp
Increment/Decrement:
- Increment/decrement all numbers found.
- Duplicate selection and increment/decrement all numbers found.
- Create sequence — Keep first number, replace all other by incrementing
- Increment duplicate numbers
Sort with natural order or Collator:
- Reversing order of lines
- Shuffle lines
- Sort case-sensitive A-z
- Sort case-sensitive z-A
- Sort case-insensitive A-Z
- Sort case-insensitive Z-A
- Sort line length asc., desc.
- Sort hexadecimally
- Sort lines by subselection — only one selection/caret per line is handled
- Sort tokens (delimited text)
Align:
- Align carets/selections into a vertical line by inserting spaces
- Format selected text to columns/table by a chosen separator/delimiter and sort by columns
- Align text to left/center/right
Filter/Remove/Trim/Minify/Convert…:
- Grep selected text, All lines not matching input text wil be removed. (Does not work in column mode)
- Inverted Grep
- Trim
- Replace whitespaces with a single space char
- Remove all spaces
- Remove duplicate lines
- Keep only duplicate lines
- Remove empty lines
- Remove all newlines
- Minify JSON
- Minify JavaScript
- Convert Between JSON and YAML
Other:
- Reverse Letters
- Swap Characters/Selections/Lines/Tokens
- Wrap or shift double quotes to single quotes to backticks
- Swap between double quotes and single quotes
- Switch file path separators: Windows<->UNIX
Actions are available under Edit menu, or via the shortcut “alt M” and “alt shift M”.
The Key Promoter X helps you to learn essential shortcuts while you are working. When you use the mouse on a button inside the IDE, the Key Promoter X shows you the keyboard shortcut that you should have used instead. This provides an easy way to learn how to replace tedious mouse work with keyboard keys and helps to transition to a faster, mouse free development. The Key Promoter X tool window shows you a hit-list of the mouse actions you use the most and directly provides you with the shortcut you can use instead. For buttons that don’t have a shortcut, the Key Promoter X prompts you with the possibility to directly create one.
Material Theme UI is a plugin for Android Studio that changes the original appearance to a Material Design look and feel. this plugin offers a panoply of settings to tweak up the IDEs the way you want. Aside for its impressive palette of themes, it also offers:
- Replacement of all icons with colorful Material Design icons
- Customization of most of the IDE’s controls and components
- A lot of options, such as accent colors, padded menus, custom indent, arrow styles and such
- Some useful tweaks, such as Project View Decorators, Language Additions, etc…
