JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Since IntelliJ IDEA is so much loved by keyboard addicts, here is a tiny yet helpful feature introduced in version 9.0.2: you can change size of a tool window by means of your keyboard.

Say, you’re doing “find usages”, the tool window is popping up and it’s too small for you to comfortably look at the usages tree. Now you don’t have to grab a mouse to stretch it up, just hit Ctrl-Shift-Up (Meta-Shift-Up for Mac users) and your tool window is getting bigger.

So, if you need to resize a tool window: focus it (by Alt-number or Ctrl-Tab) and then use Ctrl-Shift plus an arrow key that points to the direction you want.

You can also use these arrow shortcuts to resize dialogs and actually any window that IntelliJ IDEA shows. Say, you opened the project structure dialog and it’s too narrow for you. Use Ctrl-Shift-Right and Ctrl-Shift-Down to make it bigger.

In Maia you can quickly look up a value in a debugger session by hovering your mouse over it (which is very handy for text values, for example):


When you need to browse through a large tree of values, this popup can be set to appear only after you invoke it.


The trick is that it is still viewable, but only when you hover mouse over a value holding the Alt key. Hitting Alt when the popup is open hides it — but that’s what you probably have already guessed.

There is also an option in the Settings dialog:

You can use either a Wheel Click or Shift+Left Click to close things in the IntelliJ IDEA user interface.

Here is a short list of what exactly can be closed:

• Editor tabs
• Tool window headers and tabs inside tool windows (yes, you can just wheel-click that blue header)
• Popups like Background Tasks — just click the popup header
• Version control annotations in the code editor

You can even stop a background process without having to hit that small red cross-shaped button — just wheel-click the progress indicator.