Revealing the Darker Side of Productive Coding
A few weeks ago we finished the Early Access Program for the upcoming release of IntelliJ IDEA 12. We would like to thank all of you who evaluated the preview builds and submitted your feedback. We really appreciate support from the community, watching closely every new feature we announced and providing us with comments and bug reports. It would be absolutely impossible to do what we did without your contributions!
Today we are excited to announce that IntelliJ IDEA 12, the next major version of our flagship Java IDE, is finally released and available for download.
As usual, it is difficult to list all the new features in the release. Every single day we try to not only add something new, but also rethink existing features to make them even more useful for your productivity and usability. So let me highlight the most exciting features awaiting you in IntelliJ IDEA 12.
New User Interface and Darcula Theme
The newest release of IntelliJ IDEA comes with a redesigned user interface, along with a new stylish dark look and feel called Darcula. The new interface is supposed to be more clean and functional. A lot of people find a dark look and feel much less distracting. Now that we’ve added it, you can focus more on the code and less on the IDE.
The new dark look and feel is fully customizable, so you can create your own dark themes, supported natively by every component of the IDE.
Brand New Compiler Mode
In addition to the interface, IntelliJ IDEA 12 introduces a completely new approach to compiling the project, which is now much faster and provides better user experience. We have rebuilt it from the ground up to move the compiler to a separate process. Now the project can be compiled automatically in background on every change you make, so you can run it almost instantly any time.
For more details about the new compiler mode see this blog post.
Java 8
Another important feature is support for Java 8, the next generation of the Java platform, announced by Oracle this year. IntelliJ IDEA 12 embraces the cutting edge version of the language and provides code assistance for the new syntax, such as lambda expressions, method references and default methods. Now you can try the new features of JDK 8 in your projects.
Android UI Designer
Over the last year Android has become the-fastest-growing mobile platform. Ever since IntelliJ IDEA introduced support for Android in its free and open-source Community Edition, we’ve worked hard to make it better with each new release. Finally IntelliJ IDEA 12 comes with well-crafted UI designer, one the most anticipated features in this release.
Read more details about the new UI designer and enjoy a demo in our blog.
Spring Frameworks Support
Intellij IDEA 12 comes with significantly improved support for Spring. The new update includes much better performance, support for XML and annotation-based configurations for the project simultaneously, enhanced dependency diagram (with drag and drop support) and of course code assistance for even more frameworks, such as Integration, Web Flow, MVC, Security, Batch and others.
Play 2.0 Support for Java and Scala
One more remarkable feature many people have been waiting for is support for the newest version of the Play framework. IntelliJ IDEA 12 enables you to create, run and debug Play 2.0 applications easily using both Java and Scala languages, with advanced code assistance, including templates support, formatter, refactorings and many other features.
Database Development Tools
While IntelliJ IDEA is frequently called the most intelligent Java IDE, it also provides powerful database tools and support for SQL. The new release reveals more exciting features for developers who use databases in their projects.
With IntelliJ IDEA 12, you not only have intelligent code assistance for SQL, but can also design your database right from the IDE. As databases are part of most projects today, it is time for us to help developers work with them more productively.
Other important features introduced in IntelliJ IDEA 12 include:
- Intelligent code formatting
- Better management tools for J2EE application servers, with support Cloud Foundry and CloudBees cloud platforms
- Support for Drools Expert with advanced code assistance
- Cucumber for JVM support
To see the full list of new features in IntelliJ IDEA 12 and to download the edition of your choice, please visit our website.
“Develop with Pleasure!”
Does version 12 work on JDK 7 or it requires JDK 6?
I will be upgrading from 11 – 12, primarily for the new compiler mode and darcula theme.
Can’t wait to see what you put in 13 that might make me want to shell out again.
(@sarah it works with jdk’s 6,7 and 8 … I’ve tried it on all of them)
Awesome! 😀
Thank you for this great tool.
Thank you so much for all your work. 12 is looking damn too fabulous.
SB, Did you try it on Mac?
When I tried to run the community edition on mac without JDK 7, it showed a dialog saying that it requires JDK 6 and I that I should download it. note that at the same time I had JDK 7 installed with Java_home set properly in the .profile
Thanks.
I am running 12 on mac and it works fine, and I am using JDK 6/7
Sarah,
Even though you can now manually edit the Info.plist file and change the required Java version to 1.7, we still recommend running under Java 6. Much fewer UI issues.
Great Tool, good Work JetBrains
The new L&F is superb and will probably the main reason for me to upgrade to be honest
Aside from that, the speed is much better! (I don’t know if it’s just me, but now and again the Show Usages feature is freezing everything for more than 3 seconds :-/)
Dracular is the best Swing LoF since AWT for sure!
Congrats, JetBrains! Awesome release!
We’re using Intellij IDEA at work and I have to say it’s the best IDE I’ve ever used.
How do I open/import my Play 2 project? Must I download some additional plugins or?
I already bought the ultimate edition.
But isn’t it possible anymore to change the Look and Feel? (other than use the darcula theme, that is)
No; it’s possible. Go back above and realize the reason of darkening the UI of this release; in order to keep developers out of distraction. So it’s optional… You may customize it to the way it fits you best.
Thanks for the updates. Congrats on the release and Keep up the good work Jetbrains !!!
Congrats! Counting days to upgrade!
I see in your images that the theme is application wide. See the source tree. In my case, in Ubuntu, the source tree panel has a white background. How’s that?
Thanks
Don’t bother. I’ve just found out that there is also a Darcula LaF. Nice!
If I create a new Play 2 project with the command “play new XXX” and afterwards “idea”, I don’t have syntaxhighlighting or intellisense. It works if I create everything myself though. Weird. Have to dig into this.
P.S. the speed upgrade is the best feature. Not as fast as PhpStorm yet, but much better.
Ooops, It was a human error. Nevermind my previous comment:
http://blogs.jetbrains.com/idea/2012/12/intellij-idea-12-is-available-for-download/#comment-356836
which as of yet is awaiting moderation. Please delete this and my other posting.
Congrats everyone, good job!
forgive me if my question is too naive, but does it support javaScript?
On my way to the upgrade!
Is the recommendation to use Java 6 to reduce UI issues specific to MacOS or does that go for all platforms?
The new compiler seems to have helped some choppy behaviour in 11. Darcula, surprisingly a great underestimated feature, I hate changing to anything brighter now, you can tell the difference with eye straining.
The best tool for development just keeps getting better. With Drools and Android support, I have a hard time coming up with reasons to have to use Eclipse.
THANK YOU!
Thanks a lot for the Upgraded version. Trying out the community edition with the Dark theme. Awesome!!
Regarding Darcula… If you put the cursor on a field and hit Ctrl+Shift+F7 (mark occurrences), the field is hard to read where is is assigned.
@Terence: java6 is recommended only for Mac users
@Marvin
JavaScript is supported in the Ultimate Edition.
Forgot to ask – any discounts for people who were submitting issues during EAP and release?
Even personal licence upgrade is a little expensive for me
How can I copy my plugins from IDEA 11 to IDEA 12?
Never had this problem before.
@Eugen
Great idea! And discount for plugin creators would be nice too
How to increase VM memory? I have tried to edit idea.vmoptions but without any success.
@Eugen *active* EAPers get free license.
@Vadym try idea64.vmoptions
Just upgraded and quite impressed so far, hoping my satisfaction/happiness will just keep increasing as i explore further
Is there any other theme that is a shade lighter than Darcula. The default is good but little too dark atleast for my eyes, so any recommendation will be appreciated. The IDE is quite fast as well, some of the newly introduced keyboard shortcuts are really cool.
Here’s hoping we’ll get more stellar releases in the future.
Regards.
Even though I don’t do Java development, this IDE really makes me think “oh, well…. if only I was writing in Java”. Excellent work, guys. Gongrats!
Maxim
How *active* EAPers get defined?
In my case Play 2.0 isn’t working at all.
After:
play new test-app
play idea or play idea with-sources
I have project which can be imported into IntelliJ, but IntelliJ can’t recognize method “ok”, cant find index.html. I configured Play Home in settings->play configuration and it’s pointing to my Play 2.0.4 directory, but still it’s not working.
Good work, guys. Question: Has Python support changed since version 11?
On Mac OS X, the new Contents/Info.plist does not contain the VMOptions.x86_64 key. There is a VMOptions key, but having added -Xmx arguments to it, I still don’t see any change in the memory in the status bar.
Regarding increasing heap memory for Intellij 12, this came in handy and solved the problem. http://stackoverflow.com/a/13581526.
Enjoy
Why not sales on Mac App Store?
Hello,
otherwise everything is great, except in my opinion darcula (especially editor theme) needs a little more work :). For example with “default” editor theme some tokens are rendered bold, but with darcula everything is the same (I mean JSP, HTML etc files too). Also I’m not sure about the need to change colors (for example in default editor theme Java keywords are blue, but in darcula they are orange.) For a long time product user this creates unnecessary confusion.
I know I can configure it myself – I tried, but I just couldn’t get it right. I think you too want to make transition process for your users as easy as possible. Could you look into it guys :)?
Version 12 is great, but the maven projects tab is broken in the release build. Not showing any project anymore.
@Semy
Download the Scala, SBT and Play 2.0 Plugin. After this is done, activate “scala type-aware highlighting” -> http://blog.jetbrains.com/scala/2011/03/02/type-aware-highlighting/
Restart the IDE an everything should work as expected.
Matthew,
Yes, the Python plugin was updated. Please see http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2012/11/python-plugin-for-intellij-idea-12-is-now-available/ for more details.
Semy,
Please see comment here about Play 2.0 support: http://devnet.jetbrains.net/message/5473435?tstart=0#5473435
I lost navigation in spring context files after upgrade to v12 in Community Edition
Earlier i could’ve navigated to any bean within the same context file and also to the Java class anywhere within the project from the context file using ctrl+click. This has stopped working now. Not sure if this has been disabled just in CE. Anyone facing the same issue?
If i use EAP, do i need to contribute by reporting issues/bugs or just using EAP will qualify for free license
?
Thanks.
@Marko, blue is unreadable under Darcula. Look at the image here http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-93574# Bold fonts look not so cute under Darcula, but unbolding everything is not a final decision. We’re still tuning. Btw, you can play with the original Darcula color scheme in the settings
I hate Intellij because it doesn’t have good support for GWT. We have to switch to eclipse for developing for get and android apps.
@Konstantin, yes, but a lighter shade of color X could be used for Darcula. I tried to create something from the default theme:
Dorkula: http://i.imgur.com/CsN9P.png
Darcula: http://i.imgur.com/6DOVT.png
But I asked an opinion from a friend and he preferred Darcula, because he didn’t like the bold text. So it boils down to a matter of preference. I’ll try to customize Darcula further and I guess case closed :).
Mr. Eclipse, could you please elaborate that is bad with GWT support?
Murali, could you please file a detailed bug report in our issue tracker http://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issues/IDEA. Thanks!
Darcula theme is generally OK. Before Idea 12 I used custom themes found on this blog
http://www.aremaitchconsulting.com/2011/02/color-schemes-for-intellij-idea/ so I already used to dark theme. However, those themes as well as Darcula have common problem:
color of error/info messages that shows on project load, or errors shown on facets and artefact settings dialogs use light pink background and white text. Contrast is so low that it’s impossible to read the text. I thought that Darcula (being official theme) will have that right, but it seems that I was wrong. I tried to find and change that in color scheme settings but no luck. Does anybody know how to fix this?
@bigor, look in Settings at Editor->Color&Fonts->General->Notification background and make the Background darker.
@Rico, tried that, but no effect. Thanks anyway.
You saved my life…
Keep it up.
is it possible to switch to previous theme of 11?
i think icons and colors of 11 are better than this theme.
Found out the cause of my problem:
I switched only editor color schema to Darcula and that was not enough, I wasn’t aware that theme under Settings–>Appearance also has to be switched.
I find this little bit confusing. Since notification background color is defined under Editor colors isn’t it logical that changing editor schema to Darcula should change notification background as defined in that schema.
Awesome release !
Thanks jetbrains team. I appreciate your effort.
I like using the new Dracula theme however I don’t like the green highlight that comes on when I’m editing CDATA code blocks. This green highlighting is normally there in other themes however against the darker Dracula theme background it’s too hard to see the text. Is there a way to disable or adjust this green highlight? Thanks.
@fred R : settings/editor/ Colors & Fonts / General / Injected Language Fragment
Thank u so much from 2015!)
I’m evaluating IDEA 12 Ultimate Edition for Play development. How do you import an existing Play 2.0 project?
I’ve tried “play idea” from the terminal, but when I try to import as an existing project, the resulting project shows compile errors for all Play libraries, such as “Cannot resolve symbol Controller”.
I have the Scala, SBT, and Play plug-ins installed.
Intellij Idea 12 is not applying Java colors and fonts properly to classes. Things like instance variables, constants, static variables, unused etc. Not sure what’s wrong.
Can we please have the 11 (and older) icons back? Holy moly the new themes are bad.
For anyone else who has issues with the new icons, help is here: http://bulenkov.com/2012/10/10/intellij-idea-11-icons-pack-plugin/
Once you change to darcula you can’t change back to Default. Also the block line on the left disappears with darcula theme. I use that block line all the time to see the whole block and go to the end of the block, etc.
@Erick
Thank you very much for giving details on how to change the Injected Language Fragment background color. That is annoying!
I have the same issue as Paul. Running latest version of IntelliJ (on Ubuntu) and can’t switch the theme of the editor back to default. It is stuck in Darcula.
Been running Darcula for ages – then got glare on the screen and tried to change:
First change theme. Press Apply – and don’t restart yet. Restart manually afterwards. Editor is stuck in Darcula.
Dracular theme can open source?
I think Dracula should no be so dark, because the contrast with the rest of the environment is brutal… Otherwise it’s perfect
I also can’t switch from Dracula back to Default.