IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2 Help

Groups of Live Templates

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Overview

Live Templates are managed on the Live Templates page of the Settings / Preferences Dialog. For your convenience, templates are arranged in groups, most often in accordance with the context they are sensitive to.

IntelliJ IDEA comes with a set of predefined groups of templates. In addition to them, you can define your own custom groups and templates. It is strongly recommended that you avoid storing custom templates in predefined IntelliJ IDEA groups. For this purpose, use the user group, or a new group.

IntelliJ IDEA stores definitions of custom live template groups and templates added to predefined template groups in automatically generated configuration files <group_name>.xml.

  • For a custom group, the file contains definitions of all the templates the group includes.
  • For a customized predefined group, the file contains definitions of the added templates only.
Depending on the operating system you are using, the <group_name>.xml files are stored at the following locations:

  • Windows: <your_user_home_directory>.IntelliJ IDEA<version_number>\config\templates
  • Linux: ~IntelliJ IDEA<version>\config\templates
  • OS X: ~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJ IDEA<version>/templates

Managing groups of live templates

  1. Open the Settings / Preferences Dialog by pressing Ctrl+Alt+S or by choosing File | Settings for Windows and Linux or IntelliJ IDEA | Preferences for OS X, and click Live Templates under Editor. The Live Templates page that opens shows all the groups of live templates that are currently configured in IntelliJ IDEA.
  2. Do one of the following:
    • To create a new custom group, click add on the toolbar and choose Template Group on the context menu. Then specify the name for the group in the Create New Group dialog box that opens.
    • To remove a group, select it in the list and click delete on the toolbar.
    • To add a template to a group, select the group, click add, and choose Live Template on the context menu. In the Template editing area, specify the settings for the new template as described in Creating and Editing Live Templates.

See Also

Last modified: 23 November 2016