Question

Every developer knows the 5 basic operations that IDEs allow to perform during a debug:

1. step into
2. step over
3. step return
4. resume
5. terminate

(according to Eclipse vocabulary)

Now take a look to the keyboard shortcuts assigned to them, in some IDEs taken as examples:

• Eclipse:
  1. F5
  2. F6
  3. F7
  4. F8
  5. Ctrl+F2
• Borland C++ Builder 5:
  1. F7
  2. F8
  3. Shift+F8
  4. F9
  5. Ctrl+F2
• Visual Studio 2010:
  1. F11
  2. F10
  3. Shift+F11
  4. F5
  5. Shift+F5
• Firefox debugger:
  1. F8
  2. F7
  3. Shift+F8
  4. F6
• Chrome debugger:
  1. F11
  2. F10
  3. Shift+F11
  4. F8

It’s a mess… I usually develop with all of them (and more) and I can never remember the correct buttons…

So the question is:

why these configurations are nowhere near standardized? Is there a project to standardize them?

How do you deal with this daily issue? Changing the configuration for each IDE? In this case which “standard” configuration do you choose? Many thanks!

Answer 1

The only solution to this problem I have seen is that some IDEs ship with key-mappings for other IDEs, for example Netbeans has a “Eclipse” preset in its key-mappings options.

The problem with this is the same as OSX using Cmd vs Windows/Linux using Ctrl IMO. Everyone started doing things their own way, and nobody wants to be the one giving up their way, especially since it would piss off their users. Maybe with time most of it will slowly be standardized, with new IDEs adopting standards and old ones dying, but I don’t see this happening anytime soon.