Making IntelliJ behave like an IDE

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.

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.

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