IntelliJ IDEA plugins which every Java developer need to have

Make life happier in IntelliJ IDEA

I am a completely IntelliJ IDEA addicted Java developer. In the past, I used NetBeans IDE (from version 4.5) and had a fun time with it but after start developing using IntelliJ IDEA (about 8 years ago) I could not go back to NetBeans. I am used to IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (free and open-source version) and found it great (and faster) for Java and Scala development. In this post, I am going to introduce some useful IntelliJ IDEA plugins which help me in everyday coding:

Java programming language uses brackets to define a block of code and there are several nested blocks in a Java program code. With the rise of the popularity of functional programming and also reactive programming in Java world, you will have several nested blocks, indentations, and brackets in your Java codes. These two plugin helps you to have better control over indentations and brackets in the Java codes. Rainbow Brackets plugin colors the brackets in your code so that you can find matching brackets easily by color. Indent Rainbow plugin colors indentations of the codes, this plugin shows you which lines don’t have proper indentation levels in red color and it is very useful.

If you use IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition like me and want to see dependencies hierarchically of your Maven project and search or find conflicts and cyclic in it, Maven Helper is a very suitable tool for you.

BashSupport provides an almost complete development environment to work with Bash scripts but IntelliJ IDEA comes with a bundled plugin for shell scripts (from version 2019.2) which is lighter than BashSupport. bundled Shell Script plugin is not compatible with BashSupport and you could not use BashSupport and bundled Shell Script plugin simultaneously and should disable one of them. Generally, bundled Shell Script plugin is enough for basic routine functionality and provides better integration but if you need more advanced features like rename refactoring, documentation lookup, inspections, and … BashSupport will be your choice.

There will be a new, paid BashSupport Pro plugin that provides advanced support to work with Shell scripts. It’s still under active development and will be available in early 2020.

I don’t want to say about the benefits of Lombok library but if you don’t want to write another getter or equals method in your Java class and want to have a fully-featured builder, Automate your logging variables, and much more with one annotation in your class, I suggest to use Lombok library and then you need to install this plugin to access generated things by Lombok library in IntelliJ IDEA!

If you are using Spring MVC (Boot), JAX-RS, or Micronaut to develope REST API or web application in Java, by using this plugin you can quickly find and navigate between URL mapping declarations in these frameworks. By pressing Ctrl (cmd) + Shift + Back slash you can start navigation.

I usually need a JSON parser when I use monitoring and log aggregator tools like ELK or Splunk to check something in a staging or production server. Why we should use an online service for searching, formatting and validating JSON in browser? Is it safe for production server logs? Json Parser plugin makes searching, formatting and validating JSON much easier inside IDE and offline.

CamelCase plugin has limited functionality and concentrates on switching between cases and you can switch easily between CamelCase, camelCase, snake_case, and SNAKE_CASE. by pressing SHIFT + ALT + U .

String Manipulation plugin has more advanced features and provides actions for text manipulation like Switch cases, Capitalize, To lower case, Invert case, Encode/Decode, Increment/Decrement, Sort, Align, Filter and …

Instead of more explanation, see the photo below:

Actually I haven’t found this plugin very handy But it is better than nothing for testing Regular Expression inside the IDE.

If you want to learn more IntelliJ IDEA shortcuts this plugin is for you. When you use the mouse on a button inside the IntelliJ IDEA, the Key Promoter X shows you the keyboard shortcut that you should have used instead in a popup and also for buttons that don’t have a shortcut, the Key Promoter X prompts you with the possibility to directly create one.

If your team uses Jenkins for CI and CD this plugin will be helpful, because you don’t need to regularly check Jenkins home page in the browser. Of course, this is not a perfect plugin but better than nothing.

This icon pack provides new icons for special files such as GitLab and Travis configuration, package.json, shell script, lint config, and many more file types.

Conclusion

This is my favorite list of IntelliJ IDEA plugins which make me more productive every day. Some plugins show popup or dialog when you start the IntelliJ IDEA and ask for donations or something like this that is very annoying for me but prefer to ignore then instead of removing those plugins.