Features overview

AI Assistant comes with useful functionality that can simplify your daily tasks. It offers integrated AI chat and can do things like automatically write documentation comments for you, suggest names, generate commit messages, and more.

IntelliJ IDEA lets you work with elements of code in other languages embedded in your code. You won’t notice a difference between your experience working with the core Java code and your experience with the code that you’ve injected. We provide code highlighting, completion, error detection, and other coding assistance features for embedded code fragments. To add a snippet of alternative code into Java, just press Alt+Enter, select Inject language or reference, and select the desired language from the list.

IntelliJ IDEA provides context-sensitive code completion, offering you suggestions that are only valid for the current caret position. You don’t need to use any shortcuts or configure additional settings; code completion will start as soon as you begin typing your code in the editor.

IntelliJ IDEA uses machine learning to ensure the most relevant suggestion is at the top of the list.

The Problems tool window displays issues found by IntelliJ IDEA in your project. This includes problems from project-wide analysis, Qodana code checks, and manual inspections. It also displays the results of checks for risky APIs in imported dependencies. Each issue comes with a report that includes a short description, a button to fix it, options to suppress inspections, and more.

IntelliJ IDEA is very good at checking over the quality and validity of your code with on-the-fly inspections. These inspections help you code faster, comply with the highest quality standards, and stay confident through the whole development process. We provide a host of standard inspections, as well as dozens of framework-specific ones covering a wide range of problems, such as Spring bean class autowiring errors, etc.

If IntelliJ IDEA finds any issues, it offers to help solve them via context actions, which include quick-fixes for highlighted errors and intention actions for changing your code if the issues are minor. To invoke a context action, click the light bulb icon or press Alt+Enter.

Live templates is a powerful feature that helps speed up your coding. Just type in an abbreviation predefined in the template to insert standard code constructs into your work quickly. You can also create your own custom templates, which you can use to insert snippets of code that you use repeatedly.

IntelliJ IDEA’s automatic refactoring feature lets you update your code safely and efficiently, both simplifying it and making it more readable and easier to maintain. The IDE offers a wide selection of refactorings that will help you safely rename code elements, change the signature of a class or a method, extract a code fragment to a method, and introduce variables. Watch our video on the refactorings that are essential to everyday coding.

For the Spring and Spring Boot frameworks, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate features smart code insight, inspections, instant code navigation, and highly customizable run configurations. It also offers built-in tools that let you run and test Spring apps and work with HTTP requests and database tools. You can also get an aggregated view of the client and server APIs used in your project for HTTP and WebSocket protocols in the Endpoints tool window.

For a more detailed description of what IntelliJ IDEA has for Spring and Spring Boot, check out this webpage.

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate has support for the most commonly used microservice frameworks – Micronaut, Quarkus, and Helidon. IntelliJ IDEA provides intelligent coding assistance, integration with Endpoints, and project creation wizards for all of them.

In IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, you can develop Java enterprise applications based on Jakarta EE specifications. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate supports all Jakarta EE features, including CDI, JPA, Batch, Bean Validation, JSF, JAX-RS, WebSocket, Servlets, JSP, JSON Binding and Processing, Security, and the EJB and JTA specifications. For a more detailed description of what IntelliJ IDEA has for Jakarta EE, click here.

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate comes with first-class support for Ktor – an end-to-end multiplatform framework that allows you to build various connected applications, from microservices to multiplatform HTTP client apps. In conjunction with Kotlin coroutines, it makes creating asynchronous applications a breeze. Ktor allows developers to provide the best user experience in an easy and straightforward way.

For a more detailed description of what IntelliJ IDEA has for Ktor, check out this webpage.

Remote development functionality splits your IDE into two components: a local lightweight client that provides you with a responsive JetBrains IDE UX and a remote server that handles all the heavy processing. This functionality can be initiated from IntelliJ IDEA’s Welcome screen or from an application called JetBrains Gateway, which is available in the JetBrains Toolbox App.

IntelliJ IDEA offers integration with JetBrains Space, a complete software development platform. When you connect your IDE to a Space organization, you can view and clone project repositories, create and perform code reviews with merge requests, add reactions in code review chats, and assign and mention team members. It is also possible to write and edit Space Automation scripts in IntelliJ IDEA and then track an automation job’s progress in the Git log.

Code With Me is an online collaborative experience in IntelliJ IDEA. It lets you work remotely on a shared project with your teammates, with everyone using their own screen and keyboard. You can explore code, edit it together, and see changes appear in real time. It also features built-in voice and audio calls to enhance your one-on-ones or group collaboration sessions.

JetBrains Space provides orchestration support for the remote development workflow, allowing you to create a dev environment, connect it to IntelliJ IDEA, and start coding in seconds. You no longer have to wait for projects to be built, dependencies to be downloaded, or IDEs to be indexed. Standardize your environments by installing all of the tools and libraries required by your project and reproduce them at any time to simplify onboarding.

The IntelliJ IDEA debugger is a powerful tool that can reveal what's happening under the hood of your program and help you detect bugs. The debugging procedure is very straightforward: right after you set the breakpoints and run the debugger, the IDE displays the debug result in the dedicated tool window. While examining it, you can step along your code, evaluate expressions, see and change variable values, and add watches and labels.

The built-in profiler allows you to get insights into how fast your application works and make performance issues easier to investigate. It provides accurate snapshots that help you identify CPU- and memory-intensive sections, threading issues, and suboptimal code. The results are easy to analyze and compare through convenient graphical and hierarchical representations. Also, profiling-critical data can be shown right in the editor with performance hints. The execution time and memory allocation data appear in the gutter next to the corresponding line of code.

You can manage databases right from the IDE with the Database tools that are shipped with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. Take advantage of intelligent coding assistance when editing SQL queries, connect to live databases, run queries, browse and export data, and even manage your schemes in a visual interface.

IntelliJ IDEA’s built-in terminal lets you work with the command-line shell from your IDE without having to switch to a dedicated terminal application. It supports all the same commands as your operating system. From the terminal you can easily get back to the IntelliJ IDEA UI by clicking on URLs and stack traces or by pressing Ctrl+Enter when you see a highlighted command.

If you develop a web service, you will likely test it by sending and receiving HTTP requests. Such requests are stored in .http or .rest files, which you can create, edit, and execute in the HTTP client. This tool is built into the IntelliJ IDEA editor, providing extensive coding assistance for your HTTP requests, including code completion, highlighting, refactorings, and so on. You can easily access the HTTP Client from the source code: click the globe icon next to the URL and select Open in HTTP client.

IntelliJ IDEA comes with a built-in decompiler that lets you convert bytecode into human-readable Java code and then debug it. For example, when you open a library in a .jar file without having the source code for it, the IDE will display its readable contents. The yellow panel above the editor will inform you that you are working with a decompiled file. If you want to, you can set breakpoints in the decompiled code and debug it. Read this blog post to learn more about the decompiler.

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate is fully integrated with Kubernetes – an open-source system for the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. You are able to browse cluster objects and extract their configurations, view and download pod logs, run a shell in a pod, apply resource YAML configurations from the editor, and delete resources from a cluster. In addition to this, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate offers both rich YAML support and basic JSON support, including auto-completion, quick documentation, inspections, and quick-fixes.

IntelliJ IDEA provides integration with major application servers: Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, WebLogic, Glassfish, and more. Right from your IDE, you can start and stop local servers, connect to running remote servers, deploy your artifacts on those servers, and even debug your applications on them.

You can use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to build applications with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Vue, Angular, Node.js, and other related technologies. You can expect the same advanced coding assistance that you are used to when working with Java in all of them.

In IntelliJ IDEA, you can run and debug your Node.js code and client-side apps with the help of Chrome. Put breakpoints, step through the code, set watches, and more – all from the editor with a unified experience across different kinds of applications, from vanilla JavaScript to TypeScript and Vue projects.

You can also work with HTML and style sheets in IntelliJ IDEA. Just like with other languages and technologies, you will get advanced coding assistance, including code completion, navigation, and refactorings. Additionally, you can preview static HTML files right in the IDE. The changes you make to an HTML file or the linked CSS and JavaScript files will be saved, with the preview reloaded automatically.

IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate supports Thymeleaf, Velocity, Liquid, Go Template, Mustache, and other template languages. It provides code highlighting, autocompletion, inspections, context actions, and more smart features to help you develop templates with ease.

Even if this is your first time using an IDE, it shouldn’t take you long to get your first project up and running. In the New Project wizard, you can specify the desired language, build tools (like Maven and Gradle), and JDK version. If the JDK you need is not available, the IDE will download it for you. All the remaining settings will be configured automatically. This means you’ll be able to start working just moments after launching IntelliJ IDEA. You can also open projects, import existing Maven or Gradle projects, and pull projects from version control systems.

IntelliJ IDEA includes fully functional integration with the Maven, Gradle, Ant, and Gant build tools, which help automate the build process. The IDE provides built-in options for compiling and packaging Java code, running tests, deployment, and other activities.

You can run your application in IntelliJ IDEA by simply clicking the green play button in the toolbar at the top of the window or near a class declaration in the editor gutter. If you need to customize how your program starts up, you can use run/debug configurations that contain various run and build properties, including the desired JDK/JRE, the environment in which you want to run your project, and more.

The Run Targets feature lets you run, test, profile, and debug your application in Docker containers and on remote machines. IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate provides the ability to run Java applications and JUnit tests, as well as Maven, Gradle, Micronaut, Maven-based Quarkus, and Spring Boot projects on Docker, SSH, and WSL targets.

Check out this blog post for more information.

IntelliJ IDEA supports the most popular testing frameworks, like JUnit, TestNG, Cucumber, Arquillian JUnit, and Selenium (available in the plugin Marketplace). The IDE is equipped with an environment and a set of tools for developing and running effective and readable automated tests. You can switch between test classes and source code with a shortcut, run multiple tests, view statistics for each test, and more. For analytics, use the Code Coverage feature which shows the percentage of code covered by unit tests.

If you want to receive immediate test results as soon as you make changes to your code, you can use IntelliJ IDEA's continuous testing option. Click Rerun automatically in the Run toolbar to enable the autotest-like runner. This will automatically restart any test in the current run configuration whenever you modify the source code, providing up-to-date feedback on your changes.

IntelliJ IDEA offers Git integration that lets you clone projects from Git, commit and push changes, work with several branches, manage changelists, and stage updates before committing them. In IntelliJ IDEA, you can access the history of the entire project and of individual folders and files using the Log tab in the Git tool window, or by using the respective History views. In the editor, it is possible to annotate files with historical data as git blame does.

IntelliJ IDEA comes with GitLab support that allows you to work with the Merge Request functionality right from the IDE. With its help, you can review the list of requests, check changes, leave comments, and navigate to relevant views.

You can manage Git projects hosted on the GitHub platform right from IntelliJ IDEA.

It is possible to clone repositories, share projects, and share code through gists. What’s more, IntelliJ IDEA supports creating, merging, and viewing pull requests. Watch our video to learn more about working with GitHub pull requests.

Local History is an excellent tool for tracking any changes you make. This feature also allows you to roll back to any project state, undo changes, and restore any files that were accidentally deleted. For more information about Local history, read our blog post dedicated to it.

Another powerful search tool is Find in Files, which makes it possible to search for a text string in your project and apply a variety of options to narrow down your search. For example, you can use various scopes, find occurrences, and exclude certain items from the search.

To call this tool, highlight the string you want to find and press Ctrl+Shift+F. The IDE will automatically put it in the search field.

IntelliJ IDEA has keyboard shortcuts for pretty much everything, from viewing recent files to running and debugging your project. One universally applicable shortcut is double Shift (Search Everywhere). It allows you to find just about any item inside or outside of the project. The range of your search can vary from files, actions, classes, and symbols to settings, UI elements, and even Git history.

Colored headers in IntelliJ IDEA simplify navigation when you have multiple open projects. You can assign each project a unique color and icon, making distinguishing and managing them in your workspace easier. While the headers come with predefined colors, you can customize them according to your preferences.

You can spend long days coding in front of a screen as a developer, so making the UI easy on your eyes is important. We have several options available that allow you to create a comfortable environment to work in. You can use one of the standard color themes, like IntelliJ Light or Darcula, or configure IntelliJ IDEA to synchronize its theme with your OS preferences.

Alternatively, you can give your IDE a completely new look, with over 100 interface custom themes to choose from. So whether you are in the mood for Solarized’s Californian sun vibe or feeling a little purple with Dark Purple Theme, IntelliJ IDEA has a theme for you.

You can share your IDE settings between any IntelliJ-based IDEs, ensuring a consistent and familiar working environment across various computers. There is a dedicated Settings Sync section for enabling this feature in Preferences/Settings. Once it is activated, you can choose what settings you want to sync, including UI, code and system settings, keymaps, plugins, and tools.