Useful IDE Plugins – Expert Collections

In this collection, I will not consider plugins and extensions for working with any specific frameworks and libraries, for example, Spring, but I will try to talk about those that help to work regardless of the technologies used.

Since I often give presentations and courses, two plugins are in the first place in terms of usefulness for me: Presentation Assistant and Key promoter x

Presentation Assistant helps to make the demonstration of the development process more transparent. Every time the speaker presses hotkeys or does some kind of manipulation in the IDE, a small tooltip appears on the screen containing the short name of the action and the corresponding keyboard shortcut for Windows and Mac.

Key promoter x works in the same vein, but from the reverse side. It is useful for those who are just starting to work with Intellij IDEA or planning to speed up their work in it. Each time an action is performed using the mouse or trackpad, the plugin displays the hotkeys for that action and counts the amount of “non-optimal work” for each action separately. Unlike Presentation Assistant, it is useful not only during demonstrations, but also in normal work.

The second group – plugins for working with strings and help at the time of writing the code.

One of my favorite – String Manipulation. It adds a large number of additional actions when working with strings, such as: encoding / decoding, changing the case of the written text (for example, from CamelCase to SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE), sorting, filtering and many others.

Dummy Text Generator – plugin that generates strings for every taste and color. It helps a lot in development when you need to work with test strings. Usually you have to add all sorts of rubbish to the code by accidentally knocking on the keyboard. The plug-in generates, though random, but more like the truth, text.

Rainbow brackets colors all the brackets in the code in different colors of the rainbow so that the opening and the corresponding closing brackets are the same color, this makes reading and writing the code much more convenient.

And, finally, the third group of plugins – help in the work in general.

Grep console Is a powerful tool for processing text that is output to the console. It can be colored depending on the established rules or even to hide unnecessary information. No more monotonous footcloths, just a visualized and useful log.

Another simple but very useful plugin Sidenotes allows you to add a note box to the IDE. This can be useful not only when writing code, but also at meetings or code reviews.

For those who like to control their working hours and adherents of the Pomodoro practice, I recommend the plugin Pomodoro-tm… With it, you can divide the time for work and rest, customize the intervals for yourself, and even block the development environment for the rest.

As a bonus, I’ll tell you about the plugin Power Mode II… Install it and the coding process will get +87 Epic and +46 Spectacular. I will not reveal what exactly he does in order not to spoil the impression – just try it yourself.

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