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IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 EAP: Better Synchronization of your Settings Across Devices and Other improvements

Posted on by Zlata Kalyuzhnaya

Today we’re publishing a new IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 EAP build, which includes some very interesting features. Let’s have a look!

Better synchronization of your settings across devices

If you work with JetBrains IDEs on different computers, then you have probably faced an annoying issue. For each computer you use, you need to specify the IDE settings, such as: keyboard shortcuts, syntax highlighting, appearance, plugins and other options.

The problem was partially solved with the built-in plugin, Settings Repository. For the plugin to synchronize the settings, it is not very convenient, you have to create a Git repository (on GitHub or with another service) and specify it in the IDE.

To make the process of synchronizing the settings even safer and more user-friendly, we are developing a new mechanism. This mechanism relies partly on the Settings Repository, but uses the repository on the JetBrains side to store the settings, access to this repository would then be possible through a JetBrains Account (JBA).

With this new approach, you won’t need to spend time on creating and configuring a Git repository. And now, your settings won’t be available to other users.

In addition to this more convenient method of storage, the new mechanism allows you to synchronize not only settings, but also all your installed plugins.

The new plugin will in time be made available for all our paid products (IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, PhpStorm, PyCharm, CLion, RubyMine, Rider, etc.).

What is the JetBrains Account? The JetBrains Account allows you to manage licenses, and to access forums and the JetBrains plugin repository. If you do not have the JBA, you can easily create it on the JetBrains Account website. For registration, we recommend you use the same mailbox that you purchase licenses with.

You can learn more about the JetBrains Account here.

Starting with this EAP, the new IDE Settings Sync plugin comes already built-in.

We expect the plugin to be completed this fall. It will be released with the upcoming IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3.

UPDATE: Starting from November 30, 2017 – no  invitation letter is required.

But if you are eager to test the new functionality right away and don’t want to wait until the plugin becomes publicly available; then you can request access the IDE Settings Sync plugin or be personally invited.

Here’s how  to activate the IDE Settings Sync plugin:

1. Download the new EAP build from the EAP page on our website, or via Toolbox App.

2. Receive an invitation letter.
You can receive an invitation from your colleagues and friends. Or you can request an invitation by sending an email to idea-cloudconfig@jetbrains.com. In this case, the email must be sent from the address that was used to register your JetBrains Account.

Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 12.53.56

  1. Log in to the IDE (or Toolbox App) using your JetBrains Account.Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 12.57.24
  2. Enable the sync.
    Look to the bottom of the IDE window, and locate the Status Bar and click the Gear icon.2017-09-19 11_22_53
  3. Send the invitation to a good friend through a form on the JetBrains Account website.  Screen Shot 2017-09-18 at 12.32.41

The settings you can sync with the IDE Settings Sync plugin include:

  1. Look And Feel (Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | Appearance | Theme)
  2. Keymap (Preferences | Keymap)
  3. Color Scheme (Preferences | Editor | Color Scheme)
  4. General Settings (Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | System Settings)
  5. UI Settings (Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | Appearance)
  6. Menus and Toolbars (Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | Menus and Toolbars)
  7. ProjectView Settings (Project Tool Window (syncs only IDE settings, all other settings are automatically saved in a project))
  8. Editor Settings (Preferences | Editor | General)
  9. Code Completion (Preferences | Editor | General | Code Completion)
  10. Parameter Name Hints (Preferences | Editor | General)
  11. Live Templates (Preferences | Editor | Live Templates)
  12. Code Style Schemes (Preferences | Editor | Code Style)
  13. Plugins (Preferences | Plugins)

We hope you find our new IDE Settings Sync plugin useful. Please keep in mind that this new plugin is under heavy development. If something isn’t working as expected, don’t hesitate to share your feedback with us through the comments. And don’t forget to submit bug reports to the issue tracker if you encounter any.

If you think any functionality is missing, please let us know. Your suggestions are very welcome!

In addition to the plugin, IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 will have some interesting new features.

Support for Gradle Test

Starting with this new EAP, you can run tests with coverage with Gradle Test Runner, or even when you Delegate IDE build/run action to gradle.

Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 16.39.00

Now, you can choose from the main editor how you want to run your test with coverage: with platform test runner or with gradle test runner.

Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 17.38.33

Even if you want to delegate a test to gradle, you can still run the test with coverage from the editor.

Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 16.40.06

Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 17.36.45

Support for Spring Boot 2.0 actuator endpoints

Spring Boot 2.0 brings important changes to the actuator, and this change is already supported by the new IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 EAP.

Screen Shot 2017-09-19 at 11.57.44

Happy developing!

#2017 #2017.3
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34 Responses to IntelliJ IDEA 2017.3 EAP: Better Synchronization of your Settings Across Devices and Other improvements

  1. Jan T. says:

    September 21, 2017

    When sending a mail I get a “no mailbox with this name here”. I’ld love to try that feature.

    Kind regards,
    Jan

    • Zlata Kalyuzhnaya says:

      September 25, 2017

      Hi Jan, check out your JetBrains Account. Plugin is activated. I hope you’ll like this new functionality!

  2. Federico Garcia Ronca says:

    September 21, 2017

    In EAP, I can’t login in Intellij, the option menu into help is not visible. So I can’t activate IDE Settings Sync

  3. Etienne Bruines says:

    September 21, 2017

    8 hours ago at work, I thought: it would be great to synchronize settings between my different devices.

    Now, hours later, I see this post. Just awesome!

    These things come to mind. Are any of them planned?
    – Sharing settings with co-workers; allowing them to ‘try out’ certain features, or to use a company code-style.
    – Sharing settings with different Jetbrains account (kinda related to the point above). My employee has a Company-license for me to use the software, but at home for my own projects, I have my own license and a different Jetbrains Account.
    – Sharing settings across products. It’d be nice to share the settings I have in PhpStorm, with my Gogland IDE. Of course, this not only applies to ‘different devices’, but also having both installed locally.

    • Konstantin Bulenkov says:

      September 22, 2017

      Thank you, Etienne. Yes, we’re thinking now about different profiles for settings, so you don’t need switching between different JetBrains accounts

      • Doron Gold says:

        September 25, 2017

        What about Sharing settings with co-workers?
        This would be a very useful feature.
        Is this also planned to be a part of this plugin?

  4. Max says:

    September 22, 2017

    Finally! For me, settings sync is a big step forward. Just one thing that comes to my mind:
    I’m using Windows and Mac, but I’m using different keymaps on both (and trying to keep the other settings in sync by hand). So it would be essential for me that we can optionally choose different keymaps for Windows/Mac while keeping the other settings in sync.

    • Alexander Lobas says:

      September 22, 2017

      Max, keymaps sync separately for Win, Mac and Linux.

  5. opticyclic says:

    September 22, 2017

    I have a company license server, a private license and sometimes use the community edition depending on where I am and they are licensed under different email addresses.
    Can I sync the same settings across all of them using a single JetBrains account?

    Plugins would only sync a subset when using the community edition, although sometimes I add plugins to that to add back features from the Ultimate edition and I wouldn’t necessarily want those added to the Ultimate plugin list.
    Tricky.

    Are External Tools sync’d?

    • Zlata Kalyuzhnaya says:

      September 28, 2017

      opticyclic, you can sync your settings using a single JetBrains account, only if you use license server or a private license. This plugin is available only for paid products. When you work under license server, login via ToolBox using your JetBrains account.

      You can’t sync settings using this new fancy plugin for community edition, sorry. For community edition, we have another plugin: Settings Repository,but it don’t sync plugins.

  6. Michael Werle says:

    September 22, 2017

    Read only repositories are the thing that I immediately miss from the old settings repository plugin. It was really nice to be able to have a library of corporate profiles for the following, as they are necessary to make it by standard code style checks for many projects:

    • Code styles
    • Inspection Profiles
    • Copyright Profiles (never worked quite right in settings repository for me)

    Ideally, these could be exported to some sort of group profile (invite-only, specify RO and RW access; limit which parts are exported). The read-only profile should be optionally public. And, in a perfect world, it would be great be some dot-file standard (e.g. .idearc) that projects could include to automatically point IDEA to it — i.e. open an open source project and immediately get their profiles for all of these even when they do not checkin full project files.

    Some other key plugin data to sync would be checkstyle/findbugs, as both of those often require some per-project configuration to get right, but just the 3 above would go a long way towards painless setup.

  7. Adam says:

    September 22, 2017

    Wow, thank you so much for the settings synch! That was always a thorn in my side, working on two different computers.

  8. Corey says:

    September 23, 2017

    “Please keep in mind that this new plugin is under heavy development.”

    My interpretation is that along with this expanded official integration of the Settings Repository plugin within the main product, that many of of its [tracker-reported] rough edges are getting fixed along the way, yes? Will any of these important usability fixes & improvements be found in the original Community Edition-available Settings Repository feature? Or is all improvement being committed solely to the fork of the feature that will be found only in the non-free IDE variants?

    (I think it’s already mostly clear that the free, private JetBrains-hosted git repo implementing settings storage will only be usable from paid products; I’m just asking about the availability of any other bug fixes that come from this effort.)

  9. Alexandru Jecan says:

    September 26, 2017

    Could you please explain, what the “official” structure of a Maven project in IDEA is?

    Is something like:
    project
    /myFirstModule
    /src
    module-info.java
    /mySecondModule

    or something like:
    project
    /src
    /myFirstModule
    /src

    Is there a way to create this structure automatically?

  10. Mike says:

    September 27, 2017

    Am I going crazy? Because I am pretty sure I have been sync’ing IntelliJ settings with a Jetbrains account for many years now. This isn’t a new feature is it?

    I just upgraded IntelliJ on my home machine recently and I could have swore I entered by jetbrains credentials and it retrieved my settings for me. I don’t recall importing a settings.jar.

    • Zlata Kalyuzhnaya says:

      September 28, 2017

      Hi Mike, IntelliJ IDEA have built-in plugin, Settings Repository – to sync your settings. This good old plugin synchronizes your settings if you specify in the IDE your GitHub repository, where you store your the settings.

      New IDE Settings Sync is not fully developed yet. It’s brand new.

  11. Alex Mills says:

    October 5, 2017

    How do I go about installing the new sync plugin? I requested and received an invite to the plugin via the above email address but I can’t seem to figure out how to install it (I can’t find it in the plugins list). I’ve installed the EAP via the Toolbox. I’m logged into the Toolbox, but the EAP is showing me as a general user:

    PhpStorm 2017.3 EAP
    Build #PS-173.2941.8, built on October 4, 2017
    PhpStorm EAP User
    Expiration date: November 3, 2017
    JRE: 1.8.0_152-release-1012-b1 amd64
    JVM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o
    Windows 10 10.0

  12. Trevor White says:

    October 9, 2017

    Does this work if you use a proxy server? I find this plugin just errors.

  13. Hu Jianxin says:

    October 25, 2017

    I sent a mail, but have no reply….

    • Zlata Kalyuzhnaya says:

      November 3, 2017

      Hi Hu! The invitation was send.

  14. Andrea says:

    November 5, 2017

    I can’t see the “Gear” icon in the “Status Bar” to enable the Sync. I am on EAP 2017.3.

    Any suggestion?

  15. Caleb Cushing says:

    November 24, 2017

    does this mean we’ll finally be able to not sync certain settings across computers? having font resolution size synced has been annoying with the different dpi computers, as one will be too big, another too small. Either that or maybe have options for “PC specific settings” for backup purposes more than synchronizing across computers.

  16. Mike says:

    November 30, 2017

    Looking forward to trying this – especially if it works for my scratch files

  17. Luis says:

    December 21, 2017

    What about the Run/Debug configurations?

  18. Oleksandr says:

    December 28, 2017

    Thank you for this useful plugin!

    But I see that so far I can not share my settings with colleagues, which should be incredibly useful for my team. Do you plan to add this feature?

    • Zlata Kalyuzhnaya says:

      December 28, 2017

      This question is now being discussed. Could you share more details about your use cases. What settings do you want to share with your colleagues?

      • Oleksandr says:

        December 29, 2017

        All settings – the list of plugins with its settings, checkstyle, formatter, etc.

  19. Thomas says:

    January 13, 2018

    I have a paid version od DataGrip, PHP Storm, APP Code… and I do not see gear icon anywhere? What am I missing? I pay monthly so where is the problem?

  20. John says:

    April 24, 2018

    What about syncing settings between different IDE’s? I.e. between IDEA and PyCharm.

  21. Florent says:

    May 23, 2018

    Thanks for this nice feature.
    It would be better if Inspections profiles could be synced too !

  22. Enny says:

    December 3, 2018

    How to share my IDE settings to other user?

  23. Wei Lun says:

    December 10, 2018

    Live templates are not synced

    I checked the file at jba_config, but doesn’t have template folder

    any thought?

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Posted on by Zlata Kalyuzhnaya
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