Hey, Tea Lovers! Today we will talk about the top IntelliJ IDEA plugins every programmer should have. These IntelliJ plugins help us, programmers, to be more productive and make our life easy.
This post is one of the series on Plugins or Extensions every Programmer needs for their IDE. We already discussed these for Eclipse IDE and VSCode. Please check them out.
A few of the plugins are for some fun and some are dependent on what you do. This post is an addition to our post series to improve your productivity through IDEs. We already have written posts like, “You Only Need These 7 IntelliJ IDEA Shortcuts to Skyrocket Your Productivity” and “Eclipse IDE Shortcuts to Skyrocket Your Productivity“. We will be uploading the must-have plugins for Eclipse.
I would be happy to connect with you guys on social media. It’s @coderstea on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Please Subscribe to the newsletter to know about the latest posts from CodersTea.
So let us jump right into it. But before that, prepare your cup of tea to sip and code.
Key Promoter X
Forgot to use the shortcut, again? No worries, this plugin helps you remind you what shortcut you can use instead of what you just clicked. Remember the teacher always says, “You can ask me 1000 times if you don’t understand it”? Well, it was mostly a lie. Ask more than twice and she/he will scold you with 1000 words. This plugin, on the other hand, doesn’t do that. It will remind you of what shortcut you could have used for that particular thing you just did on IDE. You don’t need to search the internet to find what shortcut you use for opening a terminal. More about the plugin on IntelliJ IDEA Plugin: Key Promoter X
SonarLint
SonarLint is like a spell checker for your code. It can show the bugs, and vulnerabilities in your code or how can you make your code more standardized. And all this happens as you type the code. It helps to identify the issue even before the code is run. This helps us, developers, to write better and safer code. No more code smell. It can analyze code written in Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Kotlin, Ruby, HTML & PHP.
You can find more details on the IntelliJ IDEA Plugin: SonarLint or SonarLints official website.
Codota
Codota is an AI completion for your code. The official introduction says, “Codota completes your line of code based on millions of open-source Java programs and your context helping you code faster with fewer errors.”, and it does. It is like your code completion has become a superhero suddenly. I recommend you use it as it has reached the highest peak for autocompletion for code.
Visit Codota.com or IntelliJ IDEA Plugin: Codota.
Grep Console
Searching for a particular event in the log of thousands of lines is suffering. It is like finding a needle in the grass. But here comes the Grep Console for the rescue. As the name suggests you can filter the particular text or string you want in the log. And by log, I mean the console itself and not the file. It lets you search the console with the expression you want to search in the log. Not only that, but you can customize it in many different ways.
For starters, you can change the color of the log text based on some expressions. For example, For any text matching .*ERROR*.
color, is red. You can even fold the output. Filter out the unwanted log and many more.
More at IntelliJ IDEA Plugin: Grep Console
Request Mapper
A very handy tool if you are working on a microservice or a project with lots of URLs. It makes it easy to find the code for a particular URL in the code. When you have lots of URLs mapped and you want to jump to the code of a specific controller, say GET /v2/product/cart/{userid}, you can just put the URL in the search box of the plugin and it will jump you to the code for that mapping.
More at IntelliJ IDEA Plugin: Request Mapper
Lombok
Well, how can I forget the most useful plugin of all, “The Boilerplate Code Remover: Lombok”? The first plugin you should install in the IDE, be it IntelliJ or Eclipse. I have written an in-depth article exploring Lombok itself in a two-part series ie. Say Good-Bye to Boilerplate Code with Lombok: Part 1-Installation and Part 2-The Code.
Bonus IntelliJ IDEA Plugins
GapStyle Color Scheme
I use this for my code editor theme. It only changes the code color on the editor. Very lightweight and works like a charm. More on GapStyle here.
Rainbow Bracket
This plugin color the bracket differently to make it easy to find and match them. Helpful when we have a nested code. More on Rainbow Bracket here.
Progress Bars
Well, the progress bar is what you see regularly. why not make it more interesting instead of dull line highlighting? The most popular one is Nyan, but I personally like the Street Fighter one. Recently a lot of progress bar has been published including, Mario, Sonic, and Pacman. I am currently using PacMan by the way.
String Manipulation
It allows you to do lots of action on your string. The handiest feature is to convert yourString to YOUR_STRING or your_string or YourString with a shortcut. More on String manipulation here.
Conclusion
These were the plugins every programmer should have in their IntelliJ IDEA. These help to boost your productivity to its maximum. I haven’t put all the plugins, just the ones that I used and had a lot of effect on me. And I think these will help you too. We will be posting the same for Eclipse IDE. So please follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and Facebook.
See you in the next post.
Did I miss anything? Do you want to add some other IntelliJ plugins to the list? Please tell me in the comment.
I would be happy to connect with you guys on social media. It’s @coderstea on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
Please Subscribe to the newsletter to know about the latest posts from CodersTea.