Early Access Program IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA 2022.3 EAP Is Open!

The Early Access Program for our next major release, IntelliJ IDEA 2022.3, is now open!

We invite you to join the program to test the new features and help us make IntelliJ IDEA better for you. You can download the new EAP build from our website, get it from the free Toolbox App, or update to it using snaps if you’re an Ubuntu user.

If you’re not yet familiar with the Early Access Program and its key concepts, check out this blog post to learn about what the EAP is and why you should participate in it.

The first IntelliJ IDEA 2022.3 EAP build brings access to the new UI via an optional setting, an enhanced user experience when working on multiple screens, Maven-related updates, and more. 

User experience 

New IntelliJ IDEA UI available via a setting 

As you may already know, late in May this year we announced a closed preview program for IntelliJ IDEA’s new UI. With this first step, we aimed to introduce the reworked look and feel of the IntelliJ-based products to a limited number of users. The preview program helped us accumulate a lot of insightful feedback and process it, and now we are ready to invite everyone to try out the new UI.

The key changes in the new UI are:

  • Simplified main toolbar with new VCS, Project, and Run widgets.
  • New tool windows layout.
  • New Light and Dark color themes.
  • Updated icon set.

We’ve also published a more detailed list of changes and known issues.

We invite you to switch to the new UI in Settings/Preferences | Appearance & Behavior | New UI Preview, give it a test drive, and share your thoughts about this huge change with us.

Option to dock tool windows to floating editor tabs

To make it more convenient to arrange your working space and interact with IntelliJ IDEA on multiple monitors, we’ve implemented the option to drag tool windows out of the main window and dock them to floating editor tabs.  

Intention action preview enabled by default 

The preview functionality for intention actions is now switched on by default, so you can instantly see how your code will be altered once you apply the IDE’s suggestions. The preview appears when you open the list of available intention actions and hover on one option or another. You can disable the preview feature by pressing F1 /  Ctrl+Q  while the list of intention actions is open.

Improved user experience with Search Everywhere results

We have fine-tuned the algorithm behind the Search Everywhere result list to make its behavior more predictable and the selection of the elements you’re searching for more accurate. Now, when you start typing your query, the IDE freezes the first search results that appear and doesn’t re-sort them when more options are found (as was the case with earlier versions). 

Also, the machine learning ranking is now enabled by default for the Files tab, resulting in the improved accuracy of the lookup results and shorter search sessions.

Build tools 

Maven2 Support plugin

Starting from v2022.3, we’re unbundling support for Maven2, making it available through a separate plugin that you can find and install via Settings/Preferences | Plugins or download from the Marketplace

Java

Java 6 and older 

Please be aware that IntelliJ IDEA 2022.3 won’t support running and testing Java applications that use Java 6. Java 6 reached “end of life” status several years ago, and Oracle stopped providing support and security updates in 2018.

Note that it will still be possible to use IntelliJ IDEA to write code compatible with Java 6. In order to compile it, run JUnit tests for it, or deploy it to an application server, however, you’ll need to use Java version 7 or newer.

You can always use IntelliJ IDEA 2022.2 or an older version to run Java 6 projects. All previous versions of IntelliJ IDEA can be found on our website.

These are the most notable updates for this week. To see the full list of implemented changes, please refer to the release notes.

We are continuing to work on improvements and new features, and we’ll announce more changes next week. Stay tuned and don’t miss out on the next EAP build!

If you encounter any bugs while working with this build, please submit a report using our issue tracker. And if you have any questions or feedback, let us know in the comments below or get in touch with our team on Twitter.

Happy developing!

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