As an Android developer, I live my life one repetitive task after another:
- Clean, Run
- Uninstall, Run
- Restart
- Clean, Restart
- Restart with Debugger
Click here, click there. Tap on the phone. Open menu. Tap menu.
It never ends.
Plug-in to the rescue
To ease up the pain, we developers tend to create tools and one of my trusty companions is ADB Idea, a plugin for IntelliJ and Android Studio that adds a new menu:
A few classic commands that I use are:
- Clear App Data and Restart
- Restart App with Debugger
I also often use Uninstall App, but 99 times out of 100, it’s followed by Run, so at some point I though:
There must be a way to combine this two commands!
Turns out there is a way!
Macros to the rescue
IntelliJ and Android studio have Macros, a way to record a sequence of commands and later run it in one shot.
You can create a macro from the Edit menu:
Now the macro recording started and we can select the first command:
Then we select the second one:
We can now stop the recording:
We choose a name:
And we are done! We now have a new menu item:
We can run the macro in multiple ways: the menu above or via Find Action (Cmd + Shift + A):
We can even assign a keyboard shortcut:
to be able to quickly Uninstall and Run the current app with a super fast⚡keys combination 💪🏻
Conclusions
In this quick tutorial, we learned about:
- ADB Idea, a plugin that makes fast and handy a few routine tasks in an Android dev life;
- IntellJ/AS macros, an incredible way to bundle commands and run them all together, as we need them.