Describes the installation and usage of the Jalopy IntelliJ IDEA Plug-in. IntelliJ IDEA [Link] is an intelligent Java IDE intensely focused on developer productivity. It provides a robust combination of enhanced development tools, including: refactoring, J2EE support, Ant, JUnit, and CVS integration. Packaged with an intelligent Java editor, coding assistance and advanced code automation tools, IDEA enables Java programmers to boost their productivity while reducing routine time consuming tasks.
Explains the steps involved to install the IDEA Plug-in.
This Plug-in requires IDEA 5.0 or higher. See Section 1.1, “System requirements” for the basic requirements to run Jalopy.
The Plug-in comes as an executable Jar Archive (JAR) that contains a graphical setup wizard to let you easily install the software. Wizard installation is recommended and explained in detail in Section 1.3, “Wizard Installation”.
If you would rather install the Plug-in manually, you have to decompress and copy the appropriate files into the different application and/or settings folders. To decompress the contents of the installer JAR, you can often use the build-in support of your file manager (e.g. Nautilus) or any other software that can handle the ZIP compression format (e.g. 7Zip, WinZip or Stuffit Expander). If you don’t have access to one of the convenience tools, you might resort to the jar command-line application that ships with your Java distribution.
If you’re upgrading from a prior version and want to keep your settings, first
copy or rename the current Jalopy settings directory to match the version number
of the new release. For instance, if your current settings directory is
C:\Documents and Settings\John Doo\.jalopy\1.9
and you’re about to install Jalopy 1.9.3, either copy the directory
contents or rename it to
C:\Documents and Settings\.jalopy\John Doo\1.9.3.
Wizard installation can perform this step automatically.
Make sure IDEA is not running and remove any present Jalopy files in your IDEA
Plugin folder. The IDEA Plugin folder is located in the root directory of
your IDEA installation, e.g. C:\Program Files\IDEA\plugins.
Check for a jalopy/lib subdirectory. If it exists, delete
its contents. Otherwise create it.
Then copy the two JAR files
jalopy-1.9.3.jar and
jalopy-idea-1.9.3.jar into this
plugins/jalopy/lib folder.
Describes how the Plug-in is integrated with the IntelliJ IDEA IDE.
The Jalopy preferences are available through the IDEA preferences dialog. In order to access the preferences, on Mac OS X you use IntelliJ IDEA → Preferences... and select the Jalopy item in the window. On other platforms the dialog is available through File → Settings....
The software adds a new menu item to the pop-up menu of Java code editors.
Format with Jalopy
Formats the contents of the editor. When currently some text is selected in the editor, only the selected text will be formatted (selective formatting). This can be especially helpful when editing portions of very large files, as selective formatting can speed up processing considerably. But comes especially when you want to limit formatting to a specific file portion in order to avoid unnecessary differences when editing a file that has not (yet) been formatted according to the active code convention.
The software adds a new menu item to the pop-up menu of certain Tool Windows. Currently it adds an item to the Project, Structure, Commander and Hierarchy Tool Window.
Format with Jalopy
Formats the selected files. Depending on the state either all Java source files of the project, the contents of the selected folder(s) (including subfolders) or the currently selected Java source file(s).
Jalopy displays all runtime messages in its own tool window. Messages are shown in a tree control, with each branch containing the messages for a specific file, and individual messages displayed as leafs. File messages show the number of leaves and the warning and error count.
The message types are differentiated with icons and by color: Errors are red with an error icon, warnings are shown in blue and display a warning sign, informational messages are black and carry a file icon and debugging messages are black and prepended by a bug icon.
Clicking on a file name will open that file, clicking on a message that contains location information will open the file containing the message and move the caret to the nominated location.
The window provides a context menu with some useful actions.
| Copy | Copies the textual contents of the selected messages into the System clipboard. If a message contains children, the contents of all children are copied as well |
| Clear | Removes all selected messages |
| Clear All | Removes all messages currently being displayed in the window |
| Select All | Selects all messages currently being displayed in the window |
Although Jalopy ships with sensible default settings (mimicking the Sun Java coding convention), you most likely want to configure the formatter to match your needs (adding copyright headers, tune Javadoc handling and the like). For such, Jalopy comes with a graphical configuration tool that lets you interactively customize the settings. See Chapter 2, Configuration for an in-depth discussion of the available options.
Please refer to Section 7.2, “Integration” for information on how to display the configuration tool from within IDEA.