Android developer — Android Studio plugins and tools
As android developers, we get more and more great solutions that make it easier for us to work with Android Studio. In the last release (Android Studio 4.1), we got navigation support for Dagger/Hilt and database inspector. Additionally, System Trace for analyzing app performance and multiple devices instrumentation tests support are features on the list for the next version of Android Studio. However, there are still many plugins and tools without which I cannot imagine our work.
String Manipulation
The first of them is String Manipulation allows string case switching and a lot of other operations on them. Case switching, sorting, filtering, incrementing, aligning to columns, grepping, escaping, encoding and many more is easy now.
CodeGlance
Similar to Sublime or Xcode, CodeGlance plugin embeds a code minimap in editor. The scrollbar gets a little bigger too. Codeglance previews the file’s code pattern, letting us quickly navigate to the desired section.
Rainbow Brackets
Nested brackets and parentheses can be a pain for programmers, especially when something goes missing. Rainbow Brackets plugin adds rainbow colors to your code for round, square, and curly braces. For developers just starting out and for those who find themselves stuck in large blocks of code, it’s a savior.
ADB Idea
ADB Idea provides single click shortcut commands for start, uninstall, kill the app, revoke permissions, and to clear application data.
To invoke this plugin you can go to Tools->Android->ADB Idea menu
JSON To Kotlin Class
Plugin for Kotlin to convert Json String into Kotlin data class code quickly.
Fast use it with short cut key ALT + K on Windows or Option + K on Mac.
Additionally, it supports:
- A range of JSON library annotations — Gson, Jackson, Fastjson, Moshi, LoganSquare and more
- Initializing properties with default values and allowing them to be nullable
- Renaming property names to be camelCase style and generating classes as inner or individual classes
- Loading JSON From Local File/Http URL provided the JSON string is valid
Name That Color
If you find naming colors in your Android codebase a headache, don’t worry, you aren’t alone! While coding is often called an art, not all developers are great at naming colors, especially the different shades.
Luckily, there is this awesome plugin that takes care of the name of color for us.
Kotlin Fill Class
There’s often a need to quickly create a Kotlin class with default properties. Kotlin Fill Class is just for that. It provides you with intent actions for empty constructors and functions, letting you initialize your arguments fast.
TabNine
this is an autocomplete plugin that harnesses deep learning to suggest smart completions, letting you write faster.
It supports 20 programming languages and is trained on around two million files from GitHub. To predict the next “token” it looks for patterns found in the training data set. This makes TabNine especially useful in idiomatic programming.
Clear Cache
Typically, when a developer needs to remove cache, they have to traverse the .gradle directory. That’s time-consuming. You could create a Gradle script to accelerate this process, but why reinvent the wheel?
By using the Clear Cache plugin we can retrieve all packages with the given prefix and delete those that are no longer required.
FCM Helper
Plugin for the FCM notification configuration with Services and metadata for the kotlin.
If you want to integrate FCM notification then you can integrate it with less efforts using this plugin.
Vysor
Vysor is an application that allows you to mirror and control your Android device via your computer. It is very useful for demo or discussions about the application’s layout, mostly nowadays when we work from home because of COVID-19 situation.
Summary
Please remember, overdoing plugins in your IDE won’t really accelerate your workflow. Instead, it might significantly slow down the performance of your Android Studio. I would recommend to pick a few of these plugins and try incorporating them during your day-to-day work.
