Brent was watching me fly through some FinalBuilder operations the other day and he suggested I write a blog post about the best keyboard shortcuts to use.

Even as a power user/developer, you can sometimes use a tool every day and not know the best keyboard shortcuts for it. I only learned many of the keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio after I attended a special session at TechEd last year.

I don't want to drown you in information here, so I'm going to list four shortcuts that are essential to know, and another four that are very useful.

Essential

If you own a keyboard and use FinalBuilder or Automise, the following keyboard shortcuts are essential. They will improve your productivity ten-fold!

Key	Context	Description
Ctrl-I	Main IDE Window	Focus the Actions filter field to search for a new action. If the filter field is already focused, this keystroke hides the Actions sidebar instead.*
Ctrl-Right	Selected action(s)	Indent the selected action(s) as new children of the action above them.
Ctrl-Left	Selected action(s)	Outdent the select action(s) relative to their parent action
Ctrl-Up/Down	Selected action(s)	Move selected action(s) up and down

In my opinion, using the Ctrl-Arrow keys to rearrange actions is essential (drag and drop is just too fiddly!) 

^* The "hide sidebar if currently focused" feature is new in FB 6.

Very Useful

The following key combinations are very useful when you are typing in a text field while editing an action:

Key	Description
F3	Define a new variable on-the-fly.
F2	Pop up an advanced edit dialog with lists of variables, PropertySets, etc.
F12	Pop up a list of suggested variable replacements.
Ctrl-Space	Automatic completion for variable and PropertySet names.

For FB 6, we also did a lot of work on the Tabbing behaviour in the IDE. You should be able to use Tab to navigate the main IDE elements very easily.