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Accelerating Android Application Development With the ADB Idea Pluginby@leonidivankin
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1,626 reads

Accelerating Android Application Development With the ADB Idea Plugin

by Leonid IvankinOctober 11th, 2022
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In this article, I want to tell you about a useful plugin ADB Idea. I use it every day, but I noticed that others use it in their work quite rarely.
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In this article, I want to tell you about a useful plugin ADB Idea. I use it every day, but I noticed that others use it in their work quite rarely.

Working With ADB Idea

The plugin is off by default.

After adding it, the toolbars will appear:



All this plugin does is replace the standard ADB commands. For example, the ADB Kill App is analogous to the ADB shell am kill terminal command. The advantage of ADB Idea is that the most frequently used commands are placed in the toolbar and you don't have to remember them all the time.


Start the app. Click on the ADB Kill App command, and verify that the application has closed and disappeared from the recently used stack.


You can optimize even more. Since the commands are present in the panel, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to them, just like any other, which will also speed up development.


Let's go into the Keymap settings:

In the search box, type ADB and you will see the necessary commands. Find the previously described ADB Kill App and assign a key combination to it, such as Option+K. Click OK. Close the menu, launch the app, and press Option+K. We will make sure that the application is closed.

Creating an ADB quick list

There are quite a lot of useful adb commands. So, we run the risk of cramming all the key combinations. The way out of this is to create a quick list.


Let's go to Preferences > Appearance & Behavior > Quick Lists:


Create a new Quick List (point 1). Give it a name (point 2). Fill it with the commands we need (point 3).


Go to Keymap, find Quick Lists, and then the adb we created and assign a key combination to it. In my case, it's Option+F2. Let's press OK:
Launch the application again and press Option+F2 and fast 4. Make sure that the application is closed.

You can read more about the plugin here: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7380-adb-idea https://github.com/pbreault/adb-idea

Conclusion

As you can see, a small ADB Idea plugin can speed up development considerably. You don't need to type long commands in the terminal and memorize them. You can set keyboard shortcuts on the commands and enter them into the Quick list. In my experience, there are a few disadvantages to ADB Idea:


  1. When updating the Android Studio, the plugin does not always have time to quickly update and is sometimes no longer compatible.
  2. Sometimes the plugin stops attaching to the application process.
  3. There is no possibility of creating custom more complex commands. However, despite all these disadvantages, ADB Idea still greatly speeds up application development.