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In Pursuit of Excellence. 10 IntelliJ IDEA Plugins to Make Your Code Perfect

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One of the core advantages of CodeGym, compared to other online Java courses or alternative ways to learn this programming language, is that our platform is designed to take total beginners in coding and turn them into real professional developers, good for full time employment. CodeGym’s course is very practical and focused on applicable skills and knowledge. That is why we are trying to teach our students to use all the main tools professional software developers are using on a daily basis. And being used to coding in an integrated development environment (IDE) is a crucially important skill and one of the reasons so many CodeGym students are able to find a job soon after finishing the course or while still in the middle of it. Our students get to start working on real coding tasks from Level 3, and pretty soon begin to develop mini-projects (writing a complete piece of software on your own) and games, doing all coding in CodeGym’s IntelliJ Idea plugin.In Pursuit of Excellence. 10 IntelliJ IDEA Plugins to Make Your Code Perfect - 1

10 Best IntelliJ IDEA plugins

Getting used to coding in IntelliJ IDEA, the most popular integrated development environment in Java, is important, because this way students start writing code like professionals from the very beginning. As for the quality of your code, it makes perfect sense to make it functional first, and then work on improving polishing it. But even better is to start getting used to writing a top notch quality code right off the bat. Constant pursuit of excellence is how professionals are born, agree? This is why today we decided to make a list of the best IntelliJ IDEA plugins that allow you to make your code better. Just remember: using various coding tools and frameworks can make your job much easier, but they won’t do it for you.

1. Codota

Codota is a great plugin that completes lines of your code looking for similarities in the base of millions of open source Java programs and analysing the context. Basically, Codota helps you to code faster while making fewer errors. In the recent update developers have introduced a full line AI autocomplete feature.

2. Rainbow Brackets / Rainbow Parentheses

Rainbow Brackets is a simple but pretty useful plugin designed to simplify the work with brackets. With this plugin installed, each pair of brackets/parentheses gets a different color, which makes it so much easier to quickly identify the bracket that needs to be closed.

3. CheckStyle-IDEA

Checkstyle-IDEA is a handy static code analysis tool that checks if Java source code is compiling correctly. It provides both real-time and on-demand scanning of Java files with CheckStyle from within IDEA.

4. EduTools

EduTools is a really cool plugin because it allows you to learn and teach IntelliJ based programming languages. This is done in the form of coding tasks with instant verification and feedback directly inside the IntelliJ Platform based IDEs. Besides Java, EduTools also supports Kotlin, Python, JavaScript, Rust, Scala, C/C++, and Go. With this plugin you can create your own interactive course with custom tasks, checks, tests, hints, and other stuff. You can share the created course either privately just with your colleagues/friends or make it public on Stepik, a learning management and MOOC platform.

5. JRebel and XRebel

JRebel and XRebel plugins allow you to code faster and stay in the flow while coding. JRebel is a productivity tool that allows developers to reload code changes instantly, skipping the rebuild, restart, and redeploy cycle common in Java development. XRebel is a performance tool that gives developers real time performance insights, aiming to help them understand and resolve potential issues faster and earlier, while still in the development phase.

6. Eclipse Code Formatter

Eclipse Code Formatter would be a great choice for those teams (or standalone developers) who are using both IDEA and Eclipse integrated development environments. It allows using Eclipse's code formatter directly from IntelliJ to maintain a common style without putting too much time and effort in it.

7. FindBugs-IDEA

What the FindBugs plugin does is provide static byte code analysis to look for bugs in Java code from within IntelliJ IDEA. FindBugs itself is a popular defect detection tool for Java that uses static analysis to look for more than 200 bug patterns, such as null pointer dereferences, infinite recursive loops, bad uses of the Java libraries and deadlocks, etc.

8. Snyk Vulnerability Scanner

The security of your software is a very important component, which the majority of inexperienced coders often tend to neglect. Snyk Vulnerability Scanner plugin helps you to find and fix security vulnerabilities in your code. Snyk integrates seamlessly into your development environment and scans the open source dependencies included in your projects. Identified vulnerabilities are displayed with actionable information, including the full dependency path and remediation advice to help you fix issues as fast as possible.

9. String Manipulation

Simple but quite useful plugin that allows you to easily perform various actions to your strings, such as case switching, sorting, filtering, incrementing, aligning to columns, grepping, escaping, encoding, etc.

10. IDEA Mind Map

Finally, having a mind map editor integrated into your IDE can be really helpful to make your work better structured and brainstorming for new ideas more effective. IDEA Mind Map allows users to create and edit mind maps represented by MMD files without leaving IntelliJ IDEA. In mind map topics you can keep simple text notes, web links and links to files.
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Maciej Level 15, Warszawa, Poland
8 December 2020
Hey, I think link to EduTools is wrong (redirect to checkstyle-idea)