Samuel Kroslak’s blog

I worked with IDEA on OpenSUSE 10.3 linux distribution, but most of the mentioned settings should be cross OS. I also found blog post by Hamlet D’Arcy over THERE. Hamlet describes his top 10 list for IDEA. Check it out too.

1. Set proper VM setting for IDEA, according to your machine. You can find one useful and straightforward property file at %idea_install_dir%/bin/idea.vmoptions. I don’t remeber defaults, but I have 2 GB of ram so I set it like this:-Xms64m
-Xmx768m
-XX:MaxPermSize=768m
-ea
2. Print-out keymap and stick it somewhere where you can see it. You can find it at IDEA welcome page. From the beginning, IDEA keymap seemed a little unconfortable to me, but after a while, I get used to it and now my writing – generating :> – speed is much faster than in eclipse. Early investment into keymap is totally worth it.
3. IDEA has best plugin system I ever seen. Look into Amount of plugins isn’t as huge than eclipse repository, but it’s big enough. It’s worth to notice that most useful plugins are installed by default. Browse to File -> Settings -> Plugins. Most of the time there is no need to go to internet, complete plugin repository is here and can be installed on click. From optionals, those are quite good in my opinion:
   1. ‘Identifier Highlighter’ – if you are used to have variable usages highlighted (as in eclipse), this is it. Most of the people disagree and find it annoying, but I like it. It has many settings.
   2. SQL Query plugin – very nice universal SQL client built in to IDE. Contains DB browser and many features you could expect from others stand-alone SQL clients.
4. use keyboard shortcuts! Main strength of IDEA is in high-quality editor, which is not perfect, but surely better than other two’s (eclipse, netbeans)