7 Must-Have Plugins for Android Studio
As an Android developer, your number one priority has to be always looking for better tools to do the job faster and with greater accuracy. Since there are innumerable components to Android development, you need all the help you can get as a developer to ease the burden. Here we’ve handpicked seven plugins for Android Studio that will speed up your development and may even cut down testing time several times!
7 Must-Have Plugins for Android Studio
#1 IdeaVim
Editor wars go back a long way, and they aren’t anymore restricted to Vim-vs-Emacs or Eclipse-vs-Netbeans-vs-IDEA turfs. Perhaps rightfully, the Vim users lament the woeful text editing capabilities of modern IDEs; and sadly, Android Studio is one of them. Yes, it offers unparalleled Android native integration, and perhaps even has the best-in-town refactoring support, but talk about slicing and dicing text like Vim and watch it fade away.
No more! IdeaVim is a plugin designed by angels themselves to pacify and merge these warring factions. Ahem. Well, not really, but we can think of it this way. Now Android Studio users can enjoy Vim-style key bindings and give up their mouse!
Get the plugin here.
#2 ADB Idea
ADB is cool, but it can be stubborn at times. For instance, if you’re developing an app that works with files, you need to uninstall it and clear its cache several times an hour. This can be a real pain, whether you’re working on the emulator or a real device.
ADB Idea solves this problem by providing hot-key access to several commands associated with hitting the reset button on an app: killing it, restarting it, clearing its data, uninstalling it, etc.
Get ADB Idea here.
#3 CodeGlance
When Sublime Text was launched in the market, one of its coolest features that won many developers over was the mini map. Code files are frequently longer than 200–300 lines, and when that happens, scrolling through them to look for a particular portion can be tedious. The mini map was a lifesaver in such cases, because how the document is structured is always at the back of your mind, and you can quickly scroll to that location (or at least get very close to it).
For those loved this feature in Sublime but miss it in Android Studio, CodeGlance is a godsend. Now you get all the goodness of Android Studio with a slick file navigation view. Get CodeGlance here.
#4 ButterKnifeZelezny
This plugin makes view injections using the Butterknife library a snap. And oh, in case you’re not using Butterknife, you must! Views and view injections are essential components of your app development, but the sheer detail involved can drive anyone crazy. Besides, there’s too much scope for human error to be doing it all by hand.
Let ButterKnifeZelezny take over!
#5 H.a.X.M (Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager)
Emulators are painfully slow unless you happen to have a top-end machine. To help speed them up, you can set up hardware acceleration at the OS-level, provided your processor supports it. Or you can do it the easy way — installing the H.a.X.M. plugin that allows hardware-accelerated virtualization for Android emulators.
The only catch: It’s an Intel-specific plugin that works with Intel architectures only. Get it here.
#6 Devknox
Devknox is an open source plugin that allows hassle-free security analysis of your app. Essentially, it’s a static code analyzer that looks for common problems in Android code; not only that, it’s able to offer improvements and fixes with just a single click.
Check out https://devknox.io to see how slick and easy it can get.
#7 Genymotion
We put this last on the list because it’s a paid offering; that doesn’t, however, mean that it’s less capable than any other. Genymotion is an incredibly fast Android emulator that lets you create custom environments quickly. As a result, the horrors associated with multi-device testing get thrown out of the window, and development gets a massive speed boost. Check out this remarkable plugin here.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but it’s enough to get you started and even open your mind to the bewildering possibilities in the Android world today. Start using them right away in your projects and experience what superpowers feel like!
