IntelliJ® IDEA 7.0

If you have special preferences in how the IDE should look, from terms of font type and size, applied Look and Feel, position of different windows and the way they appear, etc., this can all be easily achieved using the rich set of the Appearance options available in the IDE Settings dialog.

The standard UI appearance can be, for example, changed to look as follows:

You can easily customize the appearance of the IDE toolbar, by adding/removing buttons, as well as form the menus by re-ordering the and adding/removing items. Customizations settings dialog is organized straight-forward and is very easy to use.

If there is a set of commands frequently used by you, while these commands are located under different main menu items, or just deep in the menu hierarchy, you can easily create named custom command lists and assign devoted shortcuts to them, for quick call of your famous actions directly from the editor.

There is no need to dig deep into the settings dialogs hierarchy when you need to apply another Color/Code style Scheme, Keymap or even Look and Feel of the application. This can be achieved with a short series of shortcuts. Just press Ctrl + BackQuote and then the number of the scheme to change.

All colors and fonts in the editor are customizable. They can be defined on a file-type basis and previewed directly in the dialog. Each set of definitions can be stored under a unique name, for future use. It is even possible to customize the colors for highlighting different file status under version control, and much more.

While IntelliJ IDEA supports such file formats as java, jsp, html and xml, as well as allows users to define custom file formats, it is also rather easy to configure the IDE in such a way that each file format will have its syntax highlighting colors shown according to your personal preference.

For java files, you can tune highlighting so that local variables, static fields, instance fields and parameters differ from each other by color, background or font effects.