30 Days with IntelliJ IDEA. User Interface

Andrey Cheptsov

We keep saying how IntelliJ IDEA is the most intelligent IDE. This is close to obvious for all who use it every day, but there are still a lot of people out there who aren’t aware of its exciting features which make development so much more productive. That’s why we decided to create a 30-day guide helping the new users (coming from other IDEs or just the beginners) to get a quick start with IntelliJ IDEA and learn how to use its top features for more efficiency.

The guide will include 30 articles featuring different aspects of the IDE, for each day of the trial period for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, our flagship IDE for polyglot development.

We are going to publish the new articles every few days on the official website. Each article will be accompanied with a post here with highlights on the trickiest features described in the article.

User interface for higher productivity

Today we will start with the user interface. By default, IntelliJ IDEA shows you the navigation toolbar, tool window bars and the project view. This is the minimum set of what you can use to navigate around the project files and developer tools.

The navigation bar can be hidden to bring more space for the editor. The tool window bar can be also hidden by clicking the icon in the left bottom corner.

If you want to open a tool window when the tool window bar is hidden you can press Alt (Cmd for Mac) twice.

When you hide everything you don’t need, the IDE looks just like a text editor, a very powerful one at that. You can always maximize the editor by pressing Shift + Ctrl + F12 (Shift + Cmd + F12 for Mac).

Multiple windows

If you want to work with some files in a separate window, just drag the editor tab out of the window and the IDE will detach this tab into a window. You can easily drag your tabs from one window to another.

The complete article about the user interface in IntelliJ IDEA can be found here.

Stay tuned for more articles soon, and develop with Pleasure!

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