Although IntelliJ IDEA is a full-featured IDE, you may want to personalize it. There are many plugins on the JetBrains market with useful features to meet your personal or enterprise-specific needs.

The IntelliJ IDEA plugin library is very large and easy to get lost. In this blog post, we’ll share our recent and all-time favorite plug-ins. We’re also curious about your favorite plug-ins, so please share them in the comments.

A quick reminder, you can through the Preferences/Settings | Plugins to install all plug-in or click on the “welcome” page “Plugins” TAB.

Let’s get started!

Hits

Jump to Line

Many navigation operations in the IntelliJ IDEA debugger let you set breakpoints where you want them, but sometimes you just need to click to get to a line. This is where the Jump To Line plugin comes in handy. It allows you to go to any line and set the execution point there without having to execute the previous code.

It provides direct navigation – just drag and drop the arrow in the stapling area to place the execution point on the desired line. Remember that you must suspend the program before moving the arrow.

Learn more about this plug-in in our blog post.

Key Promoter X

It’s no secret that mouseless coding is faster and more efficient, but how do you become keyboard-centric when IntelliJ IDEA has so many shortcuts to remember? Key Promoter X will train you in how to use them. Like a dedicated and meticulous coach, when you click on an element within the IDE, it displays a tooltip with relevant shortcuts. In addition, for buttons that don’t have shortcuts, Key Promoter X prompts you to create a button.

Practice makes you perfect! After a while, you’ll find yourself subconsciously saving yourself a click and using the necessary shortcuts.

Maven Helper

This plug-in is an absolute must if you are looking for additional operations for your Maven project. It enables you to view, analyze, and exclude conflicting dependencies. You can also run and debug Maven targets, and so on. Try this absolute 5 star plugin!

Doc-Aware Search Everywhere

This is a great extension to the commonly used “Search Everywhere” dialog box. The plug-in adds help documents to the list of search results. Simply click on an entry that seems relevant and it will appear in your default Web browser. This is a real-time saver because you will no longer need to manually open the product help document in your browser and search for articles yourself.

Rainbow brackets

If you are annoyed by the many repeated parentheses used with nested elements, this plug-in will help you. It provides a color for each set of open and close brackets, making it easier to track where a block of code starts and ends. Trust us, once you give it a try, you’ll realize you’ve always missed it.

Randomness

Do you need to add random data, such as words, numbers, or strings, to your project? If you are “out of vocabulary,” install this plug-in, then press Alt + R on Windows and Linux and ⌥R on macOS to see a drop-down list of possible data types that can be added. Select the one you need, and the magic happens — each time you apply the action, the Randomness plug-in adds a different value.

EduTools

This plugin is beneficial to both learners and educators. It enables you to learn and teach programming languages such as Kotlin, Java, Python, JavaScript, Rust, Scala, C/C ++, and Go directly from the IDE. If you’re learning to code, we encourage you to learn by doing. Plug-ins can be installed to join public programming courses out of the box, or teachers or colleagues can sign up for custom courses. Yes, you heard that right, the Edu Tools plug-in lets you create exercises and share them with teammates.

GitToolBox

Full Git integration is already supported with IntelliJ IDEA, but this plug-in provides additional secondary functionality to meet your individual needs. People get it mainly because of inline blame – the comment shows who changed the code in a line and when. GitToolBox also adds status display, automatic acquisition and other functions.

More than 5 million developers use the plug-in to simplify their daily Git workflow.

WakaTime

It’s like a fitness tracker, but for monitoring your coded activity. The WakaTime plug-in provides a time tracking service while automatically generating neat and engaging metrics and insights. Use it to analyze your team’s productivity or find ways to improve your own programming progress.

Extra Icons

The Extra Icons plug-in is available to anyone who wants to illuminate the project view. By default, it adds a set of ICONS that IntelliJ IDEA does not support. They look great and simplify navigation between files because you can intuitively identify their types. Most importantly, these ICONS are highly customizable. You can be in the “preference” | for fine-tuning. The Preferences | Settings/Appearance & behaviors/Appearance/Extra Icons.

Bonus

Most importantly, installing the Nyan Progress Bar makes indexing much easier. If you don’t like Nyan Cats, try another character, such as Mario or random Pokemon.

We hope these plug-ins will help you fine-tune your IDE and make you happier every day. Stay productive and have fun with IntelliJ IDEA!

Happy developing!