I have been hesitant to write this article, because I think the choice of IDE tools should be extremely free, radish Chinese, each to his own. Too much talk may bring personal subjective bias. Therefore, this article will use the method of function enumerate to show and explain what I think is interesting and useful in using IDEA.

Personal before also used Eclipse and MyEclipse, after listening to friends introduce IDEA, spent a weekend to adapt to the IDEA, slowly also like the IDEA, and then to the back, Eclipse has not been opened. IDEA is the best IDE I’ve ever used.

IDEA is a JVM LANGUAGE IDE developed by JetBrains. According to the website, IDEA is the “smartest” JVM language development tool available. Website: www.jetbrains.com/idea/.



When I moved from Eclipse to IDEA, the most difficult thing was probably the shortcut keys, and it took me a week or two to get used to it. This article is not to persuade anyone, when it is a personal summary, interested friends can follow my list of these points to play IDEA, maybe you will like TA.


1) The theme of the IDEA is exquisite and the appearance level is high

The most intuitive feeling is that the black theme of IDEA is really beautiful, no violation of feeling. Directly above:



Not only that, but also support to change the background image, put a luxury car as the background is more dynamic:



The setting method is as follows:



In addition, IDEA also has a rich theme library. With the address:

color-themes.com/?view=index

But IDEA has a point to ridicule: the Rendering of Chinese font is relatively poor, in the font library for a long time to find two or three fonts are acceptable. If you have a good font, welcome to recommend, thank you.


2) with decompiler, you can easily view the source code

When invoking a method in a JRE or a third-party JAR package, it is sometimes impossible to fully understand the use of the method. Direct view of the source code, can let us more secure. At the same time, there is no need to introduce resource bundles, which only adds to the burden.



3) Support structure view

Native support for structural view, at the same time, not only support for Java classes, even support for HTML, JS and other structural parsing.

See the Structure window above. One more JS version.



4) Support the connection and operation of mainstream databases

IDEA is directly integrated with DataGrip, JetBrains’ database client software that supports all major databases on the market. In terms of personal experience, the efficiency and intelligence of operating the database is superior to navicat, SQlyog and other clients. No more toggling between tools.


5) Terminal console, which can connect to Linux server

Include Terminal console, you can easily execute Git Maven gradle and other commands.

You can also connect to a remote Linux server to realize the integration of r&d, operation and maintenance. That’s great.



6) Front and rear end code integration workbench

IDEA is not only an intelligent backend code IDE, but also an excellent front-end development tool. In essence, IDEA integrates with JetBrains’ other well-known IDE: WebStorm. Installing the necessary plug-ins can make front-end development even more efficient.


7) Intelligent reminders are everywhere

IDEA is a smart software, Spring Boot, Java, Html, JS and so on can do the maximum intelligent tips. Greatly improve the efficiency of programming. Smart alerts also show one more thing: code reviews.

Code reviews allow us to write more efficient, clean, and maintainable code, and they also improve efficiency by allowing us to give real-time hints as we code without having to use Findbugs and other tools to do it by hand.

For example, it’s easy to write code like this using Eclipse:

import com.google.common.base.Strings; /** * Created by Liwen.D on 2017-08-04.<br/> * Created by Liwen.D on 2017-08-04."unused"})
public class TestClass {
    private static final String SEPARATOR = "&";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String result = concat(args[0], args[1]);
        String upper = result.toUpperCase();
        System.out.println("upper:: "+ upper); } /** * String concatenation * @param param1 * @param param2 * @return
     */
    private static String concat(String param1, String param2) {
        if (Strings.isNullOrEmpty(param1) && Strings.isNullOrEmpty(param2)) return null;
        else if (Strings.isNullOrEmpty(param1)) return param2;
        else if (Strings.isNullOrEmpty(param2)) return param1;
        returnparam1 + SEPARATOR + param2; }}Copy the code

This code may not be very beautiful, but it can tell the problem, let’s see how to download IDEA, see below:

You can see there’s a lot of yellow, and that’s the hint:

1 indicates that the call may have NullPointerException because the concat method may return NULL, and 2 indicates that a complete method description is required.

There are a lot of intelligent warnings like this, and IDEA also provides auto-repair.


8) Contains rich templates, but also can customize templates

In the Settings interface, the Live Template Template setting function is provided, you can customize the Template, greatly simplifying the amount of repetitive code writing.



9) Efficient integration with various frameworks

For example: Maven, Gradle, Spring, Spring Boot, etc., accelerate the construction speed of the project. IDEA also supports the development of other JVM languages such as Kotlin, Goovy, Scala, and so on.


10) Rich plug-in library

IDEA has an extremely rich plug-in library, open the Plugins interface in the setup interface, you can search and install a variety of plug-ins, there are practical, there are fun.

I also recommend a few plugins to play with:

I can’t understand English anymore;

Maven Helper: Resolves the Maven POM structure and analyzes conflicts.

Gitee: integration of domestic code hosting site code cloud;

LiveEdit: Better front-end support;

Rainbow Brackets: Make your Brackets more personal;

RestfulToolkit: You can directly locate interface methods based on url addresses, which is useful in microservices scenarios.


Finish the full!