Code faster with shortcuts in Arc

The Process Editor in Arc is full of features to boost your productivity. This article focuses on the most popular shortcuts used by Arc developers.

Despite the most obvious one: CTRL+SPACE (to access your variables, snippets, and functions) you’ll find that your development can get a lot faster if you utilize some of the keyboard shortcuts that Arc offers. 

To populate attributes or data, you might need to duplicate ATTRPUTS or CELLPUTN functions in your code. By using ALT + SHIFT + DOWN, you just need to write one function and then use this shortcut to duplicate the line:

To remove one line, you could select the line and press delete or you could just click CTRL + D and it will do it for you:

Even if Arc can replace a string into multiple locations using CTRL + H. Sometimes you might prefer to edit the same string in multiple lines. To do that hold ALT Gr and click multiple times to add new cursors:

This one is probably the best-hidden feature of Arc. By holding CTRL, you can hover over a variable to see its value and when you see a function, you can click to go to the related object, it could be a cube view, subset editor or a process (if the function is ExecuteProcess):

All your TM1 objects are accessible inside the auto-complete (CTRL+SPACE), another way to add an ExecuteProcess or CellPutN is to drag and drop the object from the menu into your code:

Below are other popular shortcuts that can make a big difference:

• Ctrl + F: Find.
• Ctrl + H: Replace in all tabs.
• Ctrl + /: Toggle comment.
• Ctrl + Shift + F: Fold/Expand region.
• Ctrl + Shift + E: Execute Process.
• Tab – Useful with snippets to tab through arguments of a function and update the value. You can also combine this with Shift to go back to the previous argument.
• Ctrl + Alt + Left / Right arrow – Add multi cursor to next/previous occurrence of the current selection
• Ctrl + Alt + K – Highlight all occurrences of the current selection to the current tab e.g Prolog
• Ctrl + Alt + Click and drag mouse – Add multi cursor to multiple lines in the same place. Useful for moving function arguments of snippets to single or multiple lines.
• Ctrl + P – Move cursor to matching opening/closing bracket. You can also combine this with Shift to highlight everything between the start and end. This particularly useful for MDX statements when you want to go to next argument with a inner/outer function or remove the value of a current argument.

The full list of shortcuts is available in the following article:

• Arc shortcut keys

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