Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Whether you realize it or not, you have a preferred environment when you're
developing software. Everyone has personal experiences—experiences with dif-
ferent editors, with different coding styles, with different operating systems, and
so on—all of which contribute to the growth of specific patterns or habits that
maximize your productivity. It's a rare developer who can drop into a totally new
environment and maintain their usual pace and quality of development.
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for corporate policy to enforce environ-
mental change. You may not have a choice over the coding standard against
which you must adhere, or what revision control system you use, or even what
IDE
has been mandated. Any policy that drags you away from your habits—out of
your comfort zone—will have a detrimental effect on your productivity.
Luckily, one of
IDEA
's strongest features is its wealth of customization options.
IDEA
provides a number of facilities for customizing its look and feel, as well as
its operation.
Suppose for a moment that you've joined the in-house development shop at
ACME
Incorporated, where a team of developers and architects is working on a
small-scale enterprise Java application. They're trying to adhere to a test-
driven development methodology and have a coding standard that is a slight
variant from the Sun Java coding standard. This chapter will showcase some of
IDEA
's customizable settings that make a transition to this environment as pain-
less as possible.
12.1 Configuring IDEA's options and settings
IDEA
maintains two types of settings,
IDE
Settings
and
Project Settings
.
IDE
set-
tings pertain to all projects and control aspects of using the
IDE
that are project
independent. Project settings, on the other hand, affect only a specific project
(and are saved along with that project file). Changes to your project settings
affect only the current project, allowing you to customize things like your ver-
sion control and debugging preferences on a project-by-project basis.
All of
IDEA
's settings are accessed through the
Settings
icon of the main tool-
bar, through the
File | Settings
menu option, or by using the default keyboard
shortcut
Ctrl+Alt+S
. Each of these approaches brings up the
Settings
panel
shown in figure 12.1. The upper half of the panel is dedicated to project settings,
those which apply to a specific project and have no effect outside that scope. Most
of these settings panels have been introduced in their respective chapters;
table 12.1 describes them briefly.
