Merlin's Delphi Forge

Starting with Delphi 4 certain shortcuts have changes and/or been added that make it hard to put certain letters into the Code Editor or Object Inspector. For example the Polish letter “ś” is entered by pressing Alt + S. Well, Delphi doesn’t make this possible because Alt + S is already assigned as an IDE shortcut. You can either:

1. Copy the letter in another application and then paste it in Delphi .
2. Use the Alt + character code method to create the letter.
3. Disable Alt shortcuts in Delphi. This is the preferred way by programmers who have to create non-English applications every day. To turn the shortcuts off launch the Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and find the following key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Borland\Delphi\4.0 (or whatever version you are using)\Editor\Options. Now create a string value named “NoCtrlAltKeys” and set it’s value to “1″. If you have Delphi running remember to restart it.

If you don’t want to bother with the Find dialog then there sure is hope The Delphi/Kylix IDE has a shortcut – Ctrl + E. After pressing this keystroke notice that the status bar changes to “Searching for:”. Now all you have to do is type the text you are looking for. The text will appear in the status bar and the IDE will select the next occurrence as you type. To exit “search mode” just press Esc.

This is very helpful is you just want to find some text quickly. This way does not support regular expressions, though.