IntelliJ IDEA keyboard shortcuts for Mac

JetBrains states that on macOS the default keymap is the one named macOS. Two others ship alongside it: IntelliJ IDEA Classic, a legacy keymap that resembles the Windows default, and macOS System Shortcuts, which exists specifically to avoid clashing with the system's own chords. They are genuinely different bindings, not cosmetic variants, and this page documents the default macOS keymap only.

That distinction is the reason most IntelliJ shortcut lists on the web are unreliable. A chord copied from a Windows tutorial, or from someone running the System Shortcuts keymap, will simply do nothing — or something else — on a stock Mac install. Before comparing anything here against your own IDE, open Settings and look at Keymap to see which one is selected.

You cannot edit a predefined keymap in place. Changing any shortcut makes IntelliJ IDEA copy the keymap first and modify the copy, which means your bindings can drift a long way from these defaults without you ever having decided to change keymaps.

JetBrains opens its own reference with a short list of what it considers the top shortcuts, and it is a better starting point than any of the longer tables further down. Two of them are double-modifier chords rather than combinations: pressing ⇧ twice opens Search Everywhere, and pressing ⌃ twice opens Run Anything.

⌥⏎ is the single most valuable key on this list. It offers the intention actions available wherever the caret is, which means the IDE tells you what it can fix instead of you having to know the name of the fix.

⌘D duplicates the line or selection, and it is worth pausing on because the same chord means Show Diff inside the diff viewer. Overloaded chords like that are normal in this keymap — context decides.

The three paste entries are the ones people wish they had known sooner. ⌘⇧V opens the clipboard history rather than pasting the most recent entry, and ⌘⌥⇧V pastes as plain text, which is the fix for code arriving out of a browser with its formatting attached.

The movement chords follow the same rule as the rest of macOS — ⌥ for a word, ⌘ for a line — and then add IntelliJ's own structural jumps on top: ⌃M to the matching brace, ⌘⌥[ and ⌘⌥] to the start and end of the enclosing code block.

Selection mirrors movement exactly: add ⇧ to a movement chord and you drag the selection instead of the caret. The two that do not follow that pattern are the most useful of the group. ⌥↑ widens the selection to the next syntactic unit — word, expression, statement, block — and ⌥↓ shrinks it back, which is how you select a whole argument list without touching a bracket.

The folding shortcuts assume hardware most Mac users do not have: JetBrains binds them to the numeric keypad, so ⌘NumPad+ and ⌘NumPad- need an external keyboard with a number block. On a laptop the practical route is Find Action or a rebind. ⌘. is the exception and folds the current selection with no keypad involved.

The multiple-caret entries at the bottom are where this keymap gets genuinely fast. ⌃G adds a selection at the next occurrence of whatever is selected, ⌃⇧G takes the last one back, and ⌘⌃G selects every occurrence in the file at once — a rename in three keystrokes when a proper refactoring is overkill.

Completion has three levels, and knowing the difference is worth more than any other item here. ⌃Space is ordinary completion, ⌃⇧Space filters it down to what actually type-checks in this position, and ⌃⌥Space searches classes and symbols that have not been imported yet.

⌘⇧⏎ completes the current statement — closing the brackets, adding the semicolon, moving the caret to the next line — and it is the chord that makes typing a block feel less like typing punctuation.

This is the group that makes a large codebase navigable. Search Everywhere on double ⇧ covers files, classes, symbols and actions at once, and the specific variants below it are worth learning anyway because they do not make you disambiguate: ⌘⇧O for a file, ⌘⌥O for a symbol, ⌘F12 for the structure of the file you are already in.

⌘⇧⌫ is the quiet hero. It returns the caret to your last edit location, wherever in the project that was, which is the answer to having chased a definition four files deep and forgotten what you were changing.

⌘B is the workhorse: on a usage it goes to the declaration, on a declaration it lists the usages. ⌘⌥B goes to the implementation instead, which is the one you actually want in a codebase with interfaces everywhere, and ⌘U goes the other way to the super method.

F2 and ⇧F2 walk between highlighted errors without you reading the gutter, and ⌘F1 shows the description of the one under the caret. Together they turn a red file into a checklist.

The stepping keys are the plain function keys, which on a modern Mac keyboard means either pressing Fn as well or turning off the media-key behaviour in System Settings. It is worth doing: F7, F8 and ⇧F8 are the three keys a debugging session is made of.

⌃R and ⌃D run and debug whatever configuration the current context implies, so you rarely need to open the configuration list at all. ⌥F8 evaluates an arbitrary expression at the current breakpoint, which is where most debugging actually happens.

⌃T is the only refactoring shortcut you strictly need: it offers every refactoring available at the caret. The named ones below are worth learning anyway for the three or four you reach for daily — extract method, introduce variable, rename.

The version-control group is where this keymap collides with itself hardest. ⌘K commits and ⌘T updates the project, which are exactly the chords a lot of Mac software uses for something else entirely. The tool windows are numbered ⌘1 to ⌘0 in a fixed order, and ⇧⎋ hides whichever one currently has focus.

A JetBrains IDE is the hardest kind of application to record. The shortcuts are dense, most of them are invisible, and a good many change the editor in ways that look like the previous keystroke rather than the current one. Someone watching a pair-programming session or a recorded walkthrough sees a method extract itself and has no way to tell ⌘⌥M from a template from an AI completion.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each key you press as a keycap above everything else on screen. It is not a plugin — there is nothing to install into the IDE, no JetBrains Marketplace entry, and no integration of any kind. It draws a window over your other windows, and whatever is capturing the display captures it too.