Develop with pleasure – IntelliJ Idea 6.0 Beta
August 6th, 2006 by
Ioan Cocan in
Tools
IntelliJ’s Idea 6.0 Beta is out and available free for evaluation. Most expected features were GWT support, TeamCity integration, UI designer enhancements and productivity/editing features. I have not tried (yet) UI and team integration but here are some things that cought my eye.
Built-in Code coverage support – Programmers love improving their code and what better way to do this than seeing coverage percentages of your tests right within the IDE. If you are using unit testing a lot, this gives you good insights about where to focus your tests.
Project-wide error-highlighting – This is something that Eclipse had for a long time, gives you good understanding of where you should go for errors without having to recompile.
There is one missing feature that Eclipse has: selecting a variable should highlight all usages in current block.
August 9th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
In IntelliJ IDEA, selected variable is not highlighted by default, but it doesn’t mean that there is no such a feature. To highlight a variable in a file, set the cursor on the variable and press Ctrl + Shift + F7. You will not only get all the usages in a file highlighted, but also the right side bar (that is usally used for navigation between errors and warnings) will have special marks for navigating between usages. The feature is there for several releases already.
August 9th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
Indeed, this works, only it will highlight the usages of a variable everywhere in current file, not in current Java scope. If you have a variable name used a lot, this may become even more confusing.
It would be nice to also have a general editing option where this behaviour could be enabled/disabled along with the current shortcut.
August 14th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
[...] 2. Automatic selection of same word occurences within the file – when selecting a variable name – Eclipse does highlight that variable in the entire java file. This is useful. Too bad Idea doesn’t do this automatically (see Alexandra’s comment on this here: http://blog.tremend.ro/2006/08/06/develop-with-pleasure-intellij-idea-60-beta/#comments) [...]
April 6th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Peace people
We love you