appeal for usability

great features buried behind obscure keystrokes

Huh? Usually one of the first things I do after firing up a new application for the first time is
have a look at all main menu items.
Sure enough "Code -> Code Completion" lists all completions plus their shortcuts.

Look, in general I agree that it can be confusing for a beginner to have these different completion variants. However they are very useful tools for professionals.
If we are talking about how to make these tools more usable that's fine with me.
I just don't think the suggestions so far are worth the hassle (maybe with the exception of your suggestion of using a pop-up in addition to the pop-down list).

What I'd like to see are ways to make the existing variants more discoverable and self-explaining.

Maybe the following would be nice?!
If you press ctrl-space it behaves like it does now, but in addition it shows a pop-up above the current current caret that has radio buttons for each variant together with short info and keystroke (in small font size obviously):

 IDE Settings -> Code Completion)

O Basic                           O Smart                O Classes            O Word
  Ctrl-Space                        Ctrl-Shift-Space       Ctrl-Alt-Space       Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Space
  All identifiers and keywords      matching type only     Class names only     All words with this prefix
  in current scope                                         

Camel-Hump Completion (all variants): e.g. GBL => GridBagLayout
]]>

Yuck! This is worse. At least I can ignore a super completion keystroke
if I want.
Your suggestion reminds me of a fresh Windows XP install. There the
first thing I have to do is spend some minutes turning of all the
annoying "helping" features, which get in the way of doing actual work.

Bas

Come on, it's a single mouse click to get rid of this.

I am not opposed to having another action/keystroke, but none of the ]]>-space variant is still available.
Also that would not help beginning users at all to discover and understand the different variants.

I'm with Bas on this one, it completely winds me up to have to optimise an application on initial install.

However, I do I think this is the problem with trying to make an application "usable" for both new users and experienced users. Maybe on install, you could have an option to put IDEA into a Basic or an Experienced user mode (many applications do this already) and the latter wouldn't offer any help. Personally I'd rather just spend 10 minutes trawling through the keymap and the new menus to find the new funtionality, rather than get a pop-up every time I try something vaguely new or altered from a previous version.

Stephen Friedrich wrote:

Come on, it's a single mouse click to get rid of this.

It makes a bad first impression and goes against the IntelliJ IDEA
philosophy to not get in your way, in my opinion. But then I also could
not stand the KeyPromoter plugin at all, so it may just be me.

I am not opposed to having another action/keystroke, but none of the
<modifier>-space variant is still available.

AltShiftSpace? I also always liked Tab as a completion key.

Also that would not help
beginning users at all to discover and understand the different
variants.

There are help tips. Browsing the menus is also a very common way to
learn a problem. Online help is a good way too. If that still is not
enough, then this is just too complex a functionality and it should be
changed.

Bas

Hey, personally I think the current completion variants are very fine as they are.
This was just an idea that may actually help beginners.
Somehow I doubt that adding a seventh variant does much good for them, esp. if its bound
to a strange shortcut.
You're right I forgot about alt-shift - however I hate shortcuts with those modifiers, because
quite often I press the modifiers and then do not press the key (e.g. space) itselfs because
I changed my mind. In that case MS Windows toggles the keyboard layout for the current
main window from german to english, which leaves me confused for a while when
characters do not appear like I typed them.

BTW: There is already a Jira issue requesting to include completion features in OpenAPI. It is quite old and was planned for previous Idea versions, but was then deferred...

BTW: There is already a Jira issue requesting to include completion features in OpenAPI. It is quite old and was planned for previous Idea versions, but was then deferred...

Well, I guess it means everything is fine then. Case is closed.

ps.
But still, 4 keys! shortcut to get a word completion. It's like playing
piano. Bam-bam.

Here's one I really hate: The diff dialog invoked from "Commit Project".
Use case: I am about to commit all changes and want to type in a meaningful comment.
To do that I review my changes using the diff button in the "commit project" dialog.
However that dialog is modal, so I can't write the commit while I review the changes.
Invariable when I'm back to the commit dialog I start typing "Added reason code RTN, AGU" - err., now wtf were the third and forth?

Esp. nasty when you review a bunch of files at once and have to remember each and every change. Quite often I fire up UltraEdit to write my comment there while I click my way through the diffs in Idea.

But still, 4 keys! shortcut to get a word completion.
It's like playing
piano. Bam-bam.

actually, this is joke at my company because i use a lot of shortcuts and refuse to type unnecessary letters. i even made macros for things like "append else if () {}" or "insert a ; and jump to the next line" and put them on hotkeys, so playing piano is a pretty good metaphora.

Stephen Friedrich wrote:

However that dialog is modal, so I can't write the commit while I review the changes.

+10: This should really be changed.

There is, IIRC, a feature request to add a commit comment pane to the
bottom of the diff dialog if launched from the commit dialog, which,
depending on your work style, might work even better.

N.

Stephen Friedrich wrote:

Here's one I really hate: The diff dialog invoked from "Commit Project".
Use case: I am about to commit all changes and want to type in a meaningful comment.
To do that I review my changes using the diff button in the "commit project" dialog.
However that dialog is modal, so I can't write the commit while I review the changes.
Invariable when I'm back to the commit dialog I start typing "Added reason code RTN, AGU" - err., now wtf were the third and forth?

Esp. nasty when you review a bunch of files at once and have to remember each and every change. Quite often I fire up UltraEdit to write my comment there while I click my way through the diffs in Idea.

Yep, I usually just use Notepad to type up the commit message while using the Commit Project window to do diffs.

I have more or less gotten used to it, but I remember well how utterly confusing the toolwindows' title buttons were:
Changing icons, buttons appearing and disappearing.

After a while I learned that in fact there are four different states for a toolwindow.
Currently they are called
Floating, Undocked, Docked-Unpinned, Docked-Pinned
The needle button only appears when the docked button is pressed, the dock button is not visible when the floating button is pressed and floating and docked button are changing their icon depending on state. Phew...

I propose to give a distinct name to each state, e.g.
Floating, Pop-Over, Sliding, Docked

Then change the title buttons, so that there are four buttons in a radio button group corresponding to each state. Make the minimize button visually different (e.g. like the hide side button, which is a big plus btw - I always felt stupid clicking minimize again and again when I wanted to hide the side completely).
So it could look like in the attached fake - with prettier items probably, and one of the buttons should be pressed (was too lazy to do that in gimp):

Here's another one of the configure-on-the-fly-when-needed features:
If the user invokes (quick-)javadoc on a class/method without sources or javadoc attached,
then add a quickfix to the popup to choose either sources or javadoc for the specific library
that contains the class (and of course open the javadoc after that).

It would be nice if you could change the location of IDEA's support files, without having to alter the properties file by hand. Add it to the settings IDE, but warn the user that a restart is required for the changes to take effect.

Ant build files which use properties that are defined on the ant command line or provided in the execution environment (such as a custom build system) or created by a custom taskdef which is not supported by IDEA (such as ant-contrib's propertyregex) will always have references to those properties highlighted as red -- unknown. So my Ant build file will never be "green" and this makes it harder to spot things which are actual errors. There has to be a better way to deal with this.

I had this problem all over my build.xml files, but as of IDEA 6.0, if you add a call to before the first usage of these external / runtime properties, then IDEA will not highlight them as errors. For example, if you have a external property INSTALL_DIR: ]]>

I would like a version control repository browsing and history UI, the equivalent of TMate, either built-in to IDEA or as a plug-in, and independent of TeamCity, which has a different purpose and function.

Basically, I would like to keep TMate, but, for unexplained reasons, apparently that isn't possible.

There are two features that I am really missing:

1. Cyclic navigation through trees. If you choose to override a method (with Ctrl+O), you get a tree that shows the Object hierarchy and methods you can override. If the method that you want to override is the last node in this tree, you have to navigate all the way down. With cyclic navigation you would only have to navigate one step up. This confuses me very often, especially since cyclic navigation is already implemented for lists (for example in the suggestions for auto completion).

2. Class override hierarchy. If a class is overridden, there is the little "O" icon in the gutter for all overridden methods (and for the class itself). Clicking on that shows all subclasses in a list. Why not use a tree structure here to display the class hierarchy? Some classes have many, many subclasses, which is very confusing in a list.

These two features alone would be reason enough for me to upgrade.

Jan Boesenberg wrote:

2. Class override hierarchy.

Ctrl+H?

So why not display something like that when you click on the "overridden" icon? You mean before clicking on the "overridden" icon I should make IDEA display the class override hierarchy (which in my case hides the class structure) so I can then, when I click on the "overridden" icon check in the class structure how the classes displayed in the list inherit each other? I guess you can see that this is crap from the usability point of view.

1. Cyclic navigation through trees.

Why don't you just press ]]> to go to the bottom?

Why is cyclic navigation implemented in lists? You could press end there as well.

That's exactly what I do. Disabling this 'feature' is always the first
thing I do after installing IDEA.

Jan Boesenberg wrote:

Why is cyclic navigation implemented in lists? You could press end there as well.

That's very good for you, it seems different people use IDEA in different ways.

What would be nice is some easy way to add comments to a changelist while I'm working on the files. I know I can open the Changes window and "Rename" the changelist to update the Comment field, but there could be a better workflow for this.

Hello Gordon,

What would be nice is some easy way to add comments to a changelist
while I'm working on the files. I know I can open the Changes window
and "Rename" the changelist to update the Comment field, but there
could be a better workflow for this.

Do you have any particular ideas in mind?

--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com/
"Develop with Pleasure!"

I could add a button to the bar in the ChangesBar plugin to bring up an
editor for the current Changelist's description... a keystroke could be
bound to it too... would this help? Non-modal of course, maybe a
floating toolwindow...

N.

Dmitry Jemerov wrote:

Hello Gordon,

>> What would be nice is some easy way to add comments to a changelist
>> while I'm working on the files. I know I can open the Changes window
>> and "Rename" the changelist to update the Comment field, but there
>> could be a better workflow for this.

Do you have any particular ideas in mind?

IMHO the "new" GUI designer is quite unusable, as opposed to "old" one.
http://intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=237919&tstart=0

Dmitry Jemerov wrote:

Hello Gordon,

>> What would be nice is some easy way to add comments to a changelist
>> while I'm working on the files. I know I can open the Changes window
>> and "Rename" the changelist to update the Comment field, but there
>> could be a better workflow for this.

Do you have any particular ideas in mind?

What about splitting the changes window in 2 vertical panes - the left
pane would show the changes as of now, while the right one would show an
editable field with the comment.

There could be a toggle button, which would show/hide the comment pane.

That said I'd really like to see the changes window evolve into a
task-centric tool similar to Mylar, unifying changesets, issue tracking,
developer notes, etc.