IDEA VCS support
The one thing I like about IDEA is that there’s full of goodies waiting to be discovered. Like the other day, I discovered the “changes” panel (ALT-9 for toggling) that tracks the activity of my VCS. Just from a glance, it tells me what local files are non-committed and what incoming files have not been updated by refreshing my VCS at a specified time interval. Often I always forget to do an update before I start writing code which increases the chance of conflicts, but now IDEA can help me detect stale copies and recommends that I do an update, which is pretty convenient. Also it’s much easier to do “diffing” of locally modified or incoming files because all the information is presented to you in one “changes” panel. I don’t appear to find myself navigating through source trees to try to make sense of what changes need to be synchronized. There’s other stuff like “changelist” which I haven’t really use because I do incremental commits rather than batch commits but maybe I’m missing the point. Were all these available before v7? I missed out.
October 16th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
The changes panel was available in IDEA 6.0, but the detection of incoming changes was added in 7.0, along with some other goodies like create/apply patches and shelve changes. For maximum happiness with the change list functionality, you’ll want to install the ChangesBar plugin, which lets you create and move among change lists from the status bar. Change lists are a life saver if you’ve got a bunch of longer fixes in process.
October 19th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
This is one place where Eclipse was ahead of IDEA (at least for me). Eclipse’s synchronize view is excellent implementation of changes. Basically, you want to see what is coming in, what is going out, and what is a potential merge conflict. I still reach for Eclipse when I need to get serious in this department.