The family of education resources for IntelliJ IDEA welcomes a new member! Now, in addition to “What’s new” videos, documentation, blog posts and screencasts, the IDE Features Trainer plugin is available to help you learn the shortcuts for the most used IDE actions. The current version includes 5 modules: Editor Basics, Completion, Refactoring, Code Assistance and Navigation, each consisting of several lessons.
Let’s take a look at how this works. All plugin info and controls (like tasks and learning progress) are located in the Learn tool window, located near the 1: Project stripe button. To begin learning, set focus to this tool window and choose a module. You will be automatically redirected to the task of the first lesson (or, if you’re resuming learning, the task where you left off).
Each lesson consists of a sequence of tasks. In most of them, you’ll need to invoke the correct action shortcut to progress, while a few may require you to write a certain piece of code.
By default, lessons open tasks in scratch files. Some lessons, however, require a specially pre-configured project (‘Learning project’) to work correctly with the JDK. Fortunately, the plugin itself will warn you about this and will create the necessary project automatically.
WHO SHOULD USE THIS PLUGIN?
We’ve created this plugin primarily for newcomers to IntelliJ IDEA or those who have recently migrated from another IDE. Its goal is to give you basic shortcuts so you can use the IDE efficiently, right now. Which is not to say that advanced users won’t find it useful – there are always more things to discover in an IDE like IntelliJ IDEA!
There are a few other useful plugins worth mentioning that help you learn languages in IntelliJ IDEA. There’s one for Python and one for Kotlin. For more advanced users we recommend taking a look at IntelliJ Code Golf. That one helps increase your accuracy in transforming one piece of code to another using a minimum of refactorings.
INSTALLING THE PLUGIN
Like all other plugins for IntelliJ IDEA, you may find it at JetBrains Plugin Repository. Search for the IDE Features Trainer plugin and install it. After a restart, IntelliJ IDEA’s Welcome screen will add a Learn… button. Click it to start IntelliJ IDEA with the learning tool window opened.
CAN I ADD MY OWN LESSONS?
Indeed, the plugin project is hosted on GitHub and pull requests are welcome! Modules and lessons are described as XML files. To add a custom lesson, create an XML file in a corresponding directory and add a description tag to the XML file of the module.
Each command in your XML file can be one of the following:
- Print some text in the Learn tool window,
- Show some code in the editor,
- Move the caret, or
- Show a task in the Learn tool window (and check user actions here).
All lessons should end with a
WHAT NEXT?
First, we would be happy to hear your feedback on this, to help us make IDE learning smoother and more useful. Please share your experience with the course, for example by clicking the ‘Send feedback’ button in the Modules view.
Second, we would like to extend our course with more lessons for learning advanced actions or even UI. Stay tuned for more news about this.
And finally, at some point we plan to make a convenient tool for creating new lessons and modules.
If you notice any kind of strange behavior or outright bugs, please report them to the bug tracker.
Thank you, and enjoy learning IntelliJ IDEA!
With this plugin installed IDEA doesn’t remember the mode of the left side and bottom bars (you can hide them by clicking on small grey square at the left-bottom corner). Each time I re-run IDEA these bars are displayed even if I closed them before.
This is definitely a bug. Thanks for catching that. We’ll fix it in a next build.
Whoever did this, I love you.
This is like vimtutor on steroids!
I invest time in learning shortcuts for my tools, Intellij included. However I never found anything about ⌃G until today.
I’m looking forward to new lessons.
Please implement a way to distinguish new lessons coming in updates from lessons already covered if you have the time and resources.
Thank you!
It’s so cool. I hope to get more courses.
very nice and best way to learn IntelliJ. Where were you before
It doesn’t work for me, clicking in Learning window on left on one of the links like “editor basics” or “completion” brings up a code snippet, but no instructions, the learn tool window doesn’t update at all and just shows links to the categories
Could you file an issue with your IDE version and plugin version to YouTrack? https://training.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/newissue Thank you in advance.