How To Maximize Your Delphi Windows Program Development Productivity

We have seen a lot about Alister Christie from his LearnDelphi.tv website and YouTube Channel and as well as from his book “Code Faster in Delphi” that will teach us how to become productive in Delphi. Fast and efficient coding in Delphi is a great advantage in windows program development. In this session from the recently concluded DelphiCon, Alister Christie will share with us everything we need to know on how to maximize your Delphi Productivity from simple keyboard shortcuts to some techniques that are surprisingly effective.

Learn how to maximize your Delphi productivity

In this video, Alister will teach you some of the best practices to Code Faster in Delphi. Interestingly, one of the biggest improvements you can make to your productivity in Delphi is not related to Delphi at all, it’s how fast you can type. Being a programmer, you are going to do a lot of typing and even a small improvement in your typing speed can drastically boost how quickly you can code. Here, Alister will share some websites where you can test your typing and coding skills. He also mentioned that the type of keyboard you are using can also bring notable differences.

Of course, this session will not be completed without some keyboard shortcuts that his book is known about. He will share with us some tricks about quick navigation, auto code completion, quick indentation, and more. In addition to that, Alister will share the benefits of using code templates. If you have standard bits of code that you write regularly then Code templates could be a way of producing this code programmatically.

There are more tips and tricks to code faster in Delphi

Another tip to maximize your Delphi productivity is the use of various tools including the multi-paste. It is a very handy tool for doing pasting and things like SQL or some strings that you want to embed in a string list. This could help you save more time. The Form Designer is another area of Delphi that has a mini productivity hack. A few simple tricks can save you a considerable amount of time in adjusting the form layout. Here, you can play around with the VCL form designer and Quick Edit Property that allows you to customize layouts, alignments, and other properties.

Customizing the IDE is also an interesting trick in Delphi. Interestingly, the layout of the Delphi IDE can affect your performance. You can hide some buttons and bars that you seldom use for your project, you can rearrange panels so you can work on tools and areas more conveniently. Knowing Language Features and the Delphi Runtime Library or RTL can also help you save a considerable amount of time in coding. You should take advantage of these features both old and new to make you more productive and to save more time in coding.

The session also concludes with a Q&A portion. If you want to learn more about how to become more productive in Delphi, feel free to watch the video below.