Making WebStorm Friendlier

There’s a few settings I recently tweaked in WebStorm that vastly improved my development experience.
Here’s a quick rundown.

Ensure “Show Reformat Code” is disabled

Make sure these guys are off to get the popups out of your way. I also remap the commands to Ctrl+K, D and Ctrl+R, S to match my Visual Studio setup.

Tweak code completion popups

This is the setup I use:

The most important one is the Parameter Info popup - I really like having the method signatures there all the time, so making this nice and small makes it much more useful. I’d recommend trying “Insert selected variant by typing dot, space, etc” as well, for more natural completions. Can be annoying, though

Key Bindings

The default key bindings are a little all over the shop. Here’s some handy ones:

• Ctrl+T: Navigate to symbol
• Ctrl+Shift+T: Navigate to file
• F2 and Ctrl+R, R: Rename (works for files and symbols)
• Alt+Enter: Autocomplete
• Alt+Home: Super types hierarchy
• Alt+End: Sub types hierarchy
• Ctrl+R, S: Optimise Imports
• Ctrl+K, D: Reformat Document

Some of these are muscle memory from my Visual Studio settings at work, but be sure to make them something you use, because they are all VERY useful commands.

Plugins

The best plugin I’ve seen is Key Promoter. This handy extension shows a popup whenever you do something inefficiently. For example, if I go to Settings via the menu, instead of Alt+F7, it’ll show a blocker for 1s that shows the shortcut in an impossible to miss way. Recently, it noticed that I use “Close all documents” a lot, and nagged me to make a shortcut for it. I can now use Ctrl+Shift+W for that purpose, and it will nag me if I don’t.