Tuning IntelliJ IDEA

Increasing productivity

To increase productivity of IntelliJ IDEA, you can change settings that reside in the following locations (depending on your operating system):

• On Windows systems:

  <IntelliJ IDEA installation folder>/bin/idea.exe.vmoptions
                  

  or

  <IntelliJ IDEA installation folder>/bin/idea64.exe.vmoptions
                  

• On *NIX systems:

  <IntelliJ IDEA installation folder>/bin/idea.vmoptions
                  

  or

  <IntelliJ IDEA installation folder>/bin/idea64.vmoptions
                  

• On Mac OS:

  Since version 12:
  The file /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/bin/idea.vmoptions should be copied to

  ~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdeaXX/idea.vmoptions

  For example, to increase IntelliJ IDEA heap size, you should copy the original .vmoptions file from /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/bin/idea.vmoptions to ~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdeaXX/idea.vmoptions, then modify the -Xmx setting.

  For the older versions, the settings are stored in:

  /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/Contents/Info.plist
                  

Managing case of unicode literals

IntelliJ IDEA allows defining whether non-ascii characters should use literals like '\u00AB' or '\00ab'.

This behavior is controlled by the system property idea.native2ascii.lowercase. By default, upper case characters are used.

If it is desirable to use lower case characters, do the following (depending on your platform)

• 12.0+On Windows and *NIX: add the line

      idea.native2ascii.lowercase=true
  

  to the bin/idea.properties file, located under the product installation.

• On Mac OS:

  Copy the file /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/bin/idea.properties to ~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdeaXX/, open it for editing, and add the line

      idea.native2ascii.lowercase=true
  

  It is essential to create a copy, since the settings are replaced rather than added.

  For the older versions of IntelliJ IDEA, open for editing the file /Applications/IntelliJ IDEA.app/Contents/Info.plist, and add the following code:

      <key>idea.native2ascii.lowercase</key>
      <string>true</string>
  
  

  to the section <key>Properties</key> <dict> ... <dict>