JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog

Here are some new UI-related tricks which you may find useful:

1. Docked Navigation Bar (View | Navigation Bar) now shows Run/Debug controls if the toolbar is switched off.

2. You may also switch off Tool Buttons (View | Tool Buttons) and get them to appear on demand by pressing Alt key twice (or Command key on Mac OS X).

3. If the new dark tooltips on Mac OS are too hard for your eyes, go to “IDE Settings | Appearance | Tooltip mode” and set it to “System”.

These new features are available since recent IntelliJ IDEA 10 EAP, so try them now and tell us what you think!

In IntelliJ IDEA 9 (Maia), we’ve slightly changed the way you run and debug your applications. You’re still able to quickly run or debug a previous configuration (Shift+F10/F9), as well as to create and run/debug a temporary configuration in a context-dependent manner (Ctrl+Shift+F10/F9). However, it’s now much easier to select and run/debug different configurations from the keyboard.

In IntelliJ IDEA 9, you can choose a configuration that you wish to run with one of the following shortcuts:

• Alt+Shift+F9 to debug your application.
• Alt+Shift+F10 to run it.

Invoking any of these actions displays a pop-up window with available configurations, like this:

You can edit a configuration before launch (press F4) or show a configuration dialog box to edit all your configurations and their default settings (press 0). You can also instantly delete a temporary configuration by pressing Delete.

That’s not the end of the story: you’re now able to temporary switch to an opposite action directly from this pop-up window by pressing and holding Shift. When you do that, Run becomes Debug and vice versa.

And even more: we’ve extended the pop-up window with context-dependent configurations. That means whenever you press Alt+Shift+F10 right in a test method’s body, the pop-up displays a temporary configuration to run the current method only or all tests from the current test class.

We’ve also added a number of quick access shortcuts:

• 1 for a previously selected configuration.
• 2 and 3 for context-dependent configurations.
• 0 to display the Edit Configuration dialog box.

One more tip: we’ve mapped this pop-up to F9 (debugger’s Resume Program action). The pop-up now displays on pressing F9 when you’re unable to actually resume anything - that is, when you’re not yet running any debug session.

There’s a lot of useful actions in IntelliJ IDEA that don’t have shortcuts for many different reasons: they’re not used too often or there’s simply no more convenient key combinations left.

For example, I often want to get access to VCS actions like Compare with latest repository version or Revert current file or even submit a single file with a quick NPE fix without opening a menu or going to Changes view.

So how can I call any of these actions with a single shortcut? That’s really easy: I just need to define my own Quick List and map it to a shortcut (Control-X in my case). After I’ve done that, every time I press Control-X I will get a pop-up like this:

Quick List in action

Now I can press 5 to quickly commit the current file or 2 to revert all my changes. OK, now let’s see how to create a Quick List and assign it a shortcut.

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IntelliJ IDEA 9 (Maia) lets you assign custom colors to arbitrary sets of files (Scopes) in Editor tabs or Navigation lists (Go to class/file, etc):


This helps you even more quickly than before understand which class you are looking at: JDK, a library, or your own app. The feature is available in Maia builds that you can get from EAP under Settings/File Colors.