This is one of the best plugins that I’ve come across in IDEA. It simply pops up an unobtrusive window every time you do something with the mouse, that has an equivalent keyboard shortcut to remind you how you can get to that action quicker. This means you can become more productive.
An even better feature though is that if you use an action that doesn’t have a keyboard binding, after about 3 times of using an action it will ask you if you’d like to set one and take you to the preferences dialog (I’ve configured mine down to 2)
Speaking of plugins, Thoughtworks Neal Ford has a neat presentation online about some of the most useful plugins in Idea and Eclipse. There were a couple in particular I wasnt aware of
CTRL+E – Open recent files list – This makes using tabs redundant. A small popup list of files you’ve recently looked at for you to choose using, regardless of if they are appear on the tab bar, you closed or IntelliJ took the liberty of closing for you because you’ve exceeded the default 7 tab limit (super annoying coming from Eclipse, BTW)
ALT+SHIFT+CTRL+N – Symbol lookup (aka CTRL+N on roids) – Find a symbol (variable, method name, whatever) in any file. Obviously slower than CTRL+N since it has more to look through, but a zillion times efficient than opening the Find dialog and navigating its controls. BTW, Eclipse has CTRL+O, but from memory, that only looked in the currently edited file only.
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