This chapter is all about navigation. It is divided into three parts. The first part is called Omni, which deals with getting to anywhere from any place. The second is called Macro, which deals with navigating to places of significance. The third and final part is about moving within a file and it is called Micro.
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to navigate freely and quickly within PyCharm, and use the right tool for the job to do so.
Veteran PyCharm users may not find their favorite navigation tool mentioned or explained. This is because the methods of navigation described throughout this chapter will lead readers to discover their own tools that they prefer over others.
In this section, we will discuss the tools that PyCharm provides for a user to go from anywhere to any place. You could be in your project directory one second; the next, you could be inside the Python standard library or a class in your file. These tools are generally slow or at least slower than more precise tools of navigation provided.
The Back and Forward actions allow you to move your cursor back to the place where it was previously for more than a few seconds or where you've made edits. This information persists throughout sessions, so even if you exit the IDE, you can still get back to the positions that you were in before you quit.
This falls into the Omni category because these two actions could potentially get you from any place within a file to any place within a file in your directory (that you have been to) to even parts of the standard library that you've looked into as well as your third-party Python packages. The Back and Forward actions are perhaps two of my most used navigation actions, and you can use Keymap (see Chapter 2, Understanding the Keymap). Or, one can simply click on the Navigate menu to see the keyboard shortcuts:
