Sonic Pi is as much an instrument as a coding environment. Shortcuts can therefore make playing Sonic Pi much more efficient and natural - especially when you’re playing live in front of an audience.
Much of Sonic Pi can be controlled through the keyboard. As you gain more familiarity working and performing with Sonic Pi, you’ll likely start using the shortcuts more and more. I personally touch-type (I recommend you consider learning too) and find myself frustrated whenever I need to reach for the mouse as it slows me down. I therefore use all of these shortcuts on a very regular basis!
Therefore, if you learn the shortcuts, you’ll learn to use your keyboard effectively and you’ll be live coding like a pro in no time.
However, don’t try and learn them all at once, just try and remember the ones you use most and then keep adding more to your practice.
Imagine you’re learning the clarinet. You’d expect all clarinets of all makes to have similar controls and fingerings. If they didn’t, you’d have a tough time switching between different clarinets and you’d be stuck to using just one make.
Unfortunately the three major operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) come with their own standard defaults for actions such as cut and paste etc. Sonic Pi will try and honour these standards. However priority is placed on consistency across platforms within Sonic Pi rather than attempting to conform to a given platform’s standards. This means that when you learn the shortcuts whilst playing with Sonic Pi on your Raspberry Pi, you can move to the Mac or PC and feel right at home.
Part of the notion of consistency is the naming of shortcuts. In Sonic Pi we use the names Control and Meta to refer to the two main combination keys. On all platforms Control is the same. However, on Linux and Windows, Meta is actually the Alt key while on Mac Meta is the Command key. For consistency we’ll use the term Meta - just remember to map that to the appropriate key on your operating system.
To help keep things simple and readable, we’ll use the abbreviations C- for Control plus another key and M- for Meta plus another key. For example, if a shortcut requires you to hold down both Meta and r we’ll write that as M-r. The - just means “at the same time as.”
The following are some of the shortcuts I find most useful.
Instead of always reaching for the mouse to run your code, you can simply press M-r. Similarly, to stop running code you can press M-s.
I’m really lost without the navigation shortcuts. I therefore highly recommend you spend the time to learn them. These shortcuts also work extremely well when you’ve learned to touch type as they use the standard letters rather than requiring you to move your hand to the mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard.
You can move to the beginning of the line with C-a, the end of the line with C-e, up a line with C-p, down a line with C-n, forward a character with C-f, and back a character with C-b. You can even delete all the characters from the cursor to the end of the line with C-k.
To auto-align your code simply press M-m.
To toggle the help system you can press M-i. However, a much more useful shortcut to know is C-i which will look up the word underneath the cursor and display the docs if it finds anything. Instant help!
For a full list take a look at section B.2 Shortcut Cheatsheet.