Dmitry Jemerov's Weblog

IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 "Demetra": Navigation Bar

I'll start my description of IntelliJ IDEA 6.0 features with a small UI feature added to facilitate project navigation: the Navigation Bar.

The Navigation Bar is a breadcrumb-like bar which can optionally be displayed above the editor window, and which shows the module and packages in which the currently edited file is contained. For every item in the bar, you can invoke the context menu, or you can show a drop-down list containing all classes and packages in the same level as the selected item. Double-clicking an item in the Navigation Bar selects it in the Project View. The Navigation Bar fully supports keyboard navigation: Left/Right keys move between levels, and Up/Down move between items on the same level.

The main motivation for this feature was to reduce the necessity of using Project View, which takes quite a lot of screen space. We have found out that in most cases we access the project view not to browse, but rather to invoke some action (Find in Path, Inspect Code and so on) on one of the packages containing the currently open file. The Navigation Bar provides a much quicker access to such actions, and allows the left sidebar to be occupied by a different tool window (for example, Favorites or Structure View).