IDEA Plugins
While perusing intellij.org in search of the latest and greatest IDEA plugins, I couldn’t help but notice how some of them are…well…useless. So a brief summary of the top losers might be in order. Note to any plugin authors: I am not mocking you, I am mocking your plugin. I realise you likely wrote it for fun and as an educational exercise, and take no responsibility etc. If someone wants to feel insulted, then I’d like to nominate people who use these plugins and/or asked for them in the first place.
I’m also going to ignore plugins which are clearly meant to be toys (connect4, google, tetris, sonar), and focus on ones which allegedly provide worthwhile functionality. The first of this sorry bunch is ConfirmExit. A plugin designed, presumably, for those incredibly clumsy oafs who keep hitting ctrl-F4 (or command-Q, or the linux equivelant) by accident. Perhaps a diet is in order, to trim those chubby fingers before that long IDEA session you’re about to attempt.
A Spelling plugin also exists! Initially I laughed hysterically at this silly plugin. Upon further reflection, it seems that people like Fred Grott do exist outside of ’special institutes’, and I guess they need all the help they can get.
Tagify is also another plugin worth noting. It will convert html, placed in html files (where it belongs, many would argue) into out.println() statements. The advantage of this plugin is that it enables you ignore the years of effort many people have poured into coming up with solutions to prevent you from ever having to do out.println(htmlstuff).
It’s pretty annoying that there aren’t really any cool IDEA plugins. Most seem like playful halfhearted attempts at hacking up something ‘fun’ in a day or two. The clover plugin though does look interesting, in that it actually does stuff in its own right that has slightly more than passing novelty value. Having said that, it’s hard to decide if the lamentable lack of decent plugins is due to IDEA having all the cool things one would want built-in, or whether the openAPI is not rich enough for anything beyond gimmicks.
