JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

With IntelliJ IDEA 9.0.2 you can edit HTML and CSS code really fast using Zen Coding features. To use it, you have to install Zen Coding plugin for Web IDE/IntelliJ IDEA: go to Zen Coding Project Download Page, download an archive that contains a set of live templates, and extract it to “<Your Home Directory>\.IntelliJIdea90\config\templates” folder (”~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIDEA90/templates” for Mac OS X).

• Zen Coding plugin involves more than 200 different HTML and CSS live templates. To see all of them, just open Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), Live Templates, Zen Coding group.

• Native Zen Coding support allows you to generate HTML structures using complex templates. For example, try to type “form.form-comment#comment>fieldset” in an HTML file and then press TAB. In this case, “form” and “fieldset“ are live templates but you can use simple tag names instead.

• You can generate not only HTML but also XML structures. Basic features perfectly work for XML.

• “TAG.CLASS” and “TAG#ID” templates allow you to specify class and id of HTML elements, but you can specify a value of any XML/HTML attribute, i.e. you can write “person[name=Jack]“.

• You can use your own live templates as parts of complex templates. For example, suppose you have a template “entry” with the following template text: To generate a list of entries, you just need to type “entry-list>entry[number=$]*5″ and press TAB. By default, the “number” attribute will be generated before “type”. If you want to customize the position where it’s generated, add ATTRS variable to your template – for example: ATTRS variable must have empty string as a default value and should be skipped:

• Of course, you can disable Zen Coding support if you don’t need it (see Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S), XML Zen Coding).

To learn more about Zen Coding features, you can watch screencasts on Zen Coding project home page. Note that Zen Coding native support is a part of IDEA Community Edition, and its source code is freely available.

Editing CSS files in Flex applications becomes easier with the help of some new Maia features.

First, completion for CSS selectors, properties, and property values. For example, if you press Ctrl+Space in this context, you get all class names from
a default namespace http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml + global selector:

If a CSS property has a color format, IntelliJ IDEA helps you to select a color:

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In Maia you can find a new Android Logcat window that lets you see all log messages and exceptions when you are debugging an Android application.

The Logging level list allows you to select what messages are displayed in console:

• Verbose — lowest priority, all messages
• Debug
• Info
• Warning
• Error
• Fatal
• Assert — highest priority, assertions only.

Logcat supports stack trace navigation and messages highlighting (you can customize colors for various log levels in the IDE Settings dialog (Ctrl+Alt+S). Note that Logcat is available only in debug mode.

Maia provides a number of smart features to make working with Android resources simpler.

• Convenient navigation from XML resource descriptors to appropriate Java fields in an R.java class…
  
  … and from Java code to resource files.
  

• Usage search for resources. That is, when you are searching for usages of res/drawable/android.png resource file you will find both XML (@drawable/android) and Java references (R.drawable.android). By the way, searching for usages of R.drawable.android Java field yields the same results.
  
  Note that you can find usages of value resources (represented by XML tags) by pressing Shift+F6 when caret is positioned just before a tag:
  

• Rename refactoring. When you rename a resource file (i.e. res/drawable/android.png), all XML and Java references are updated automatically. Renaming of R.drawable.android Java field, as you may have guessed, has the same effect. Note that now renaming of a resource represented by an XML descriptor is possible only through renaming an appropriate Java field.

Maia provides code completion for AndroidManifest.xml and other XML resource files:

• AndroidManifest.xml file:

  

• Other XML resource files:

  

• For any Android XML file you also get completion of references to local and system resources:

  

Maia supports development of applications for Android operating system. To begin creating an Android application, open the File menu, click New Project, click Next, and then select Android Module type:

Now you need to create Android SDK — just specify its location folder and build target. IntelliJ IDEA will create a new global library for it (to which you can later attach sources or javadoc for better coding assistance).

For that you can either click View Classpath in the Android Facet configuration (which is automatically added to your module) or edit it just as any other library. Note that Android sources and javadoc are added automatically if they are located in default locations: <sdk dir>/src and <target dir>/src for source code and <sdk dir>/docs/reference and <target dir>/docs/reference for javadoc.

You can create Activities, Services, Broadcast Receivers and Remote Interfaces (AIDL files) from popup menu (Alt+Insert). IntelliJ IDEA automatically registers them in an AndroidManifest.xml file and provides syntax highlighting for AIDL code.

To create a new Android Resource, select the res folder (or any of its specific child folders) and press Alt+Insert:

To launch an Android application you can either use an Android run configuration (created automatically when Create ‘Hello, World!’ project option is selected in Android Facet settings), or just press Ctrl+Shift+F10:

You can use external JARs in your application by just adding dependencies via Project Structure dialog, Ctrl+Shift+Alt+S. Java module dependencies can be added in a similar way.