Tips for Looker Developers

Here are some quick tips that'll make your life as a Looker developer easier & happier 👇

⌨️ Learn the keyboard shortcuts! you can hit '?' or find keyboard short cuts in your profile menu for a contextual list of shortcuts dependent on where you are - IDE, Explore etc.

🔎 Find & replace FTW! The Looker IDE has a nice find & replace tool for individual files, and for searching a whole project. To look for definitions of fields/views/Explores/joins etc, add a colon at the start of your search term.

💻 Clone your projects' git repositories onto your computer so you can use a text editor like VS Code to search across all projects/use more powerful find & replace tools.

🔗 The various Looker open source tools & the API can really speed up a lot of tasks. You can even use the API for some quick/simple things just by using the built-in API Explorer. Also, be sure to check out the various open-source Looker tools: github.com/looker-open-source

🌗 Dark Mode! If you're a dark mode person like me, you can use the Dark Reader browser extension to make the Looker UI easier on your eyes. It's easy to toggle on and off.

Unfortunately it doesn't work with Looker extensions like the API Explorer...

It's also probably not a good idea to have it turned on if you're designing dashboards and choosing visualisation colours.