My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE

When using RSE for editing my CL, DDS, RPG or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. Many of the shortcuts I use are standard for other Windows-based applications that I also use for email, spreadsheets or text editing.

These include some very common ones such as:

• Ctl-C to copy, Ctl-V, or Shift-Insert to paste, and Ctl-X or Shift-Delete to cut.
• Ctl-Z to undo–very high on my list of favorites!–and Ctl-Y to redo.
• Home jumps to the beginning of a line and End jumps to the end of a line.
• Ctl-Home jumps to top of the member and Ctl-End jumps to end of the member.
• Ctl-F opens the Find/Replace dialog.
• Ctl-S saves the source back to wherever I opened it from–typically the host source member–without closing it.

Other shortcuts are not standard across other applications, but are specific to some combination of Eclipse (on which WDSc and RSE are based) or the WDSc workbench. I use these to help navigate my way around the workbench. Here are some of my favorites:

• Ctl-F6 switches between Editor tabs, i.e., it switches between open members.
• Ctl-E pops up a list of open members for selection.
• Ctl-F7 toggles between Views in the workbench (e.g., from Editor to Outline View)
• Ctl-F8 toggles between open Perspectives (e.g., from RSE to Debug or iSeries Projects)
• Ctl-M maximizes or shrinks a View in the workbench, replacing a double click at the top of the view. There is an exception to this one: it does something completely different in the Editor view. I’ll talk more about that later.
• Ctl-Shift-A brings up a dialog to open a member by filling in the library, file and member name when I don’t want to drill down using filters in RSE. In earlier releases of WDSc, this was done with Clt-Shift-I.

This last set of favorite shortcuts relate specifically to the LPEX Editor (the editor that RSE uses by default):

• Ctl-Backspace deletes a line. This comes in particularly handy when I have hit Enter too many times and accidentally end up with several blank lines in my source.
• Alt-S splits a line at the cursor position. I find this especially useful when writing RPG expressions and I run out of space on a line.
• Alt-J joins the next line to the end of the current one, which can be useful once I’ve discovered a shorter way to handle that complex expression!
• Ctl-M finds the matching End for my code block, such as an If or Do in RPG, It also works in reverse–to find the matching block beginning for an End operation. This is very helpful for sorting out complicated nesting logic in fixed-form calc specs in RPG. Note that this is the exception to the use of Ctl-M to minimize or maximize a view.
• Ctl-F5 clears out those pesky pink error messages that appear in the editor window before an expression is finished, after a cut and paste that was not aligned properly or after a “clean” verify action.
• Ctl-Shift-V verifies the source from the editor.
• Ctl-Shift-C compiles the source from the editor.

There are many more keyboard shortcuts, but these are among my favorites. I hope I may have introduced you to a few that you haven’t tried before. Maybe they will save you a little time in the future. If you want to try out some other keyboard shortcuts for the editor, key the command ? SEU in the editor command line (press Esc to get to the command line) and you will see a help page with a long list of shortcuts.

Susan Gantner is one of the most respected System i gurus in the world and is one of the co-founders of System i Developer, an organization dedicated to RPG, DB2, and other relevant software technologies for the System i platform. Gantner, who has worked in IBM’s Rochester and Toronto labs, left IBM to focus on training OS/400 and i5/OS shops on the latest programming technologies. She is a regular speaker at COMMON and other user groups, too. You can contact her at susan@SystemiDeveloper.com.

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