One of the pain points of pair programming is having to use different IDEs, especially if your team doesn’t standardise on a particular IDE. On the last few projects that I worked on, I found myself constantly shifting between IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, and switching between the different key mappings became annoying and sometimes disruptive.

In the end I discovered shortcuts in IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse that would make pair programming a lot easier. So instead of asking your pair what the shortcut is for a particular action in an IDE that you are not familiar with, you can just type Ctrl+Shift+A in IntelliJ IDEA or Ctrl+3 in Eclipse. Both of these commands will bring up a Mac-like Quicksilver prompt for you to type in an action that you want to launch.

For example, if you wanted to organise all your imports in a class, and you don’t know that it is either Ctrl+Shift+O in Eclipse or Ctrl+Alt+O in IntelliJ, then you can just bring up the action prompts and type in “import”, select the organise/optimise imports from the list of import options and hit enter, and magically your imports are reorganised.

The action prompt works for most commands that you want to do in both IDEs, so it makes it easier for you and your pair to switch between each other’s preferred IDEs without too much hassle.