Time is limited. We are competing with others, as well as with ourselves. Reducing a repetitive operation/action to 0.5 seconds, it will sum up to huge time savings.
I started programming in IntelliJ Ultimate in Apr 2008, formally. And thanks to my fellow colleagues who pair with me in daily tasks, I have learned so much from them that now I fall in love with IDE and it became a must-have in my daily work.
Below are a few must-have plugins that will boost your productivities.
GitToolbox
One of the key features of this plugin is inline blame, as shown in the below snapshot. Inline blame — show blame for the line at caret in the editor, when you cursor position changes, it outputs who wrote/changed this line, and the commit messages. This is super handy, especially when you are working with a large team: you might wonder,
- Who, in which commit did such changes?
- Why he/she did so? The commit message may give you some hits: this offers background information so that you have a better context to understand such code changes.
Sure, you can open annotations via right-click on the gutter, or via menu VCS | Git | Annotate. However, this saves you much time and the buddy is always assisting you at any time!
TabNine
TabNine uses deep learning to help you write code faster. It is not simply auto-completion facility which tightly coupled with structured information, e.g. parsed function signatures, previously typed variable names. It is intelligent, period. See also semantic completion here.
Why Tab9, not Tab5? Usually, you have up to 9 choices, by pressing Tab, `Tab Tab`, `Tab,Tab,Tab` so on and so forth.
If you are only interested in Java language, the Codota plugin helps you code faster and with fewer pesky errors. Codota completes lines of code based on millions of Java programs!
Presentation Assistant
Cannot memorize the shortcut keys which boosts your efficiency? No problem. Use this plugin to prompt you the detailed shortcut by clicking the menu. Practice makes perfect! You will remember that finally.
Recording the video tutorial and don’t want to sacrifice the precious time to explain what you did or which menu you clicked? This is all that you want!
Bonus: Another similar plugins is the IDE Features Trainer which displays helpful hints about, the IDE’s features and capabilities, and is the perfect way to get started.
See also Key Promoter X for similar plugins.
CodeGlance
Embeds a code minimap similar to the one found in Sublime into the editor pane. Works with both light and dark themes using your customized colors for syntax highlighting.
