I was working with various IDEs through my career, but non of them had such bad default settings than IntelliJ. IntelliJ, trying to be “Context Aware”, will try to think for the developer and out of the box does a lot of stuff that isn’t necessary and also reduces productivity. Here is a list of things you can do to enhance your experience.
Indentation
One of the worst default behaviors is how IntelliJ handles indentation. Often it adds additional spaces and other things. Here some settings to fix problems with this “smartness” and make it work more like other IDEs.
By default IntelliJ Uses whitespaces for indentation, what causes you to use backspace more frequently if you want to unindent something manually, or using arrow space more often if you want to navigate. Or that your file size is bigger on save and all those other issues that come from using whitespaces. You can change this here, and yes, you have to adjust it for every language.
Note: Recommended for “code looking the same” in every editor is whitespace, because tabs can be displayed in different width in different tools. The other one is comparability in tools. However, I personally prefer coding speed and reduced file size over these issues.
Show White Spaces
You can toggle white spaces here:
Converting Whitespace Indent to Tabs
Here you go “Edit >> Convert Indents >> To Tabls”:
Disable Inlay Hints
Inlay Hints can sometimes be useful but can also be too much information.
You can change Inlay Hints to use up less space or turn them off completely(you can also right click inlay hints to turn them off):
Refactoring – Do not Preselect
When using Shift+F6 to refactor names, IntelliJ by default preselects the current name. In most cases this gets in the way as you have already placed the cursor at the position where you want to insert or delete text(instead of fully override). Here you can disable this.
Auto-Import Classes
When copy and pasting code, you might end up with IntelliJ making you click on every missing class and hit “Alt + Enter” to import that missing class. If you only have two or 3 classes thats fine, but if you have like 10 plus classes it is just an annoyance. Eclipse has this built-in together with organize imports on (Ctrl+ Shift+O) . In intelliJ you have to activate it manually as follows:
