Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

Looks like the Structure101 plugin is now an official IntelliJ IDEA “companion”. At first I thought it was just a superset of IDEA’s DSM (dependency structure matrix), but it appears to have many more features than that, including ways to have your continuous build warn you of architectural violations in a way similar to PMD or Checkstyle, but obviously at a much higher level or different point of view. See the Structure101 features page on JetBrains’ site for more info.

I’ll be taking a look at the plugin soon (there’s a free trial), but I mention it because it’s not been unheard of for IntelliJ IDEA Companion products to be incorporated into IDEA itself. Based on the price of Structure101, I’m not sure that this would happen since it’s normally US$599. For now, there’s a US$100 discount through March 31, 2008 using the coupon LDJNZ-BYG0P-E1I27-OLMI9-L8KY5 at http://companions.jetbrains.com/structure101/license.html.

IntelliJ IDEA 7 (from JetBrains) is my preferred development environment for Java (and Groovy as well). Even though I’ve been using it since it first came out many years ago, I still find features that I hadn’t noticed or different ways of using features that are well-known. There are also a number of high-quality plug-ins that deserve attention as well. This is the first in a series of such tips. I’d certainly welcome any tips that you might have.

Why Quick Lists?

As time goes by, the menus in IDEA get longer, with more nesting, especially if you have plug-ins. For example, the right-click menu on a file — at least in my environment — looks like this (with the Perforce nested menu showing as well):

Since Perforce is the version-control system in use at my company (Guidewire Software), I tend to use the Perforce operations quite a bit (no surprise there). However, having to navigate the long menus is annoying and, when my mouse isn’t cooperating, really frustrating. The first thing that I did was to assign keyboard shortcuts to my common actions: add, open for edit, submit file, etc. This works well for the more frequently used functions, but for those that I don’t use often enough to deserve shortcuts (or if they did, I’d forget them when I needed to use them), it’d be nice if there was a way to create a menu that had all of the Perforce functions that I need, without having to traverse down long, nested menus. Enter the Quick Lists.

You can see how this is much better than the long menus, plus it’s easy to tie it to a keyboard shortcut: I use Ctrl+Shift+P (for Perforce).

Creating A Quick List

Go to the menu File -> Settings -> Keymaps

You’ll see the Keymaps dialog, so click on the Quick lists tab:

And then click on the Add button to add a new Quick List. Enter a short name and a description, though the description is optional.

Once you’ve named it, you can now start adding action items to your Quick List. On the left are all of the available actions and you simply select each one and add it to the right column. Since I’m creating a Perforce Quick List, I’ve navigated to the Perforce part of the tree, under Version Control.

Now that the Quick List has been created, I can assign a shortcut to it. Click on the Keymaps tab and now you’ll see the Perforce Quick List:

Select Perforce, and then define a keyboard (or mouse) shortcut on the right side of the dialog. Click OK and you’re done.

Now whenever you want quick access to the commonly used actions, you can use the QuickList.