I’ve been using Intellij Idea as IDE for some time and wanted to share my favorite plug-ins as I think they can be quite useful for every developer out there. Without a specific order here they are:

Key Promoter X: Although its name’s like cheap midi controller, it is a really useful plug-in for those who want to master intellij idea shortcuts. It shows notifications for almost each click you do and tells you its shortcuts. Also it holds statistics for you, so you have a list of most popular clicks and their corresponding keyboard shortcuts.

Lombok: This is the only plug-in in my selection that’s specific to a programming language. Lombok is a java library that lets you boilerplate code with annotations. For instance, you can add @getter and have a getter for every field in your pojo. For a flawless experience with this java library, you will need the lombok plug-in. If you don’t have a special need for upgrading to latest jdk with every version, I’ll highly recommend lombok. If you always update to the latest, then lombok can be problematic as they don’t support the new versions right away and there’s no way to upgrade lombok if its version does not support your java version.

Sonarlint: You may already know sonarqube. It’s a statistical analysis tool which finds code smells, potential bugs and so on in your codebase. Sonarlint is a plug-in that acts as a sonarqube server that runs inside your IDE. It’s great for finding potential problems in your code without any additional step.

Rainbow Brackets: The idea is quite straightforward. This plug-in colors your parentheses for better readability.

Extra Icons: This plug-in provides additional icons for your project files. After this plug-in is installed, your gitignore file gets a git icon. Your mvnw and mvnw.cmd files have maven run icons and so on.