Error visibility/handling in IDEA vs. Eclipse

Answered

I've been using IntelliJ IDEA now for a while and I really like it. But compared to Eclipse, which I used to use, I find that the way IDEA presents errors and warnings is less productive.

Two reasons for this:

1. I really miss the vertical bar that Eclipse has next to the line numbers on the left-hand side of the editor, showing error and warning symbols for visible lines. IDEA has a similar line on the right-hand side, but it's more of an outline showing for the entire buffer all of the time, so for visible lines, it's hard to make the connection between the location of the symbols and the location of the line they refer to. Also just the fact that it's on the right-hand side is not good - my display is quite wide, so there is often quite a distance between the actual code and these symbols, making it harder to notice. So, basically, I want what Eclipse has in this case.

2. If there is an error on the line I'm at, I have to move the cursor to the error in order to get its error message up in the status bar, and to be able to do Alt-Enter. This rather tedious task shouldn't be necessary, and in Eclipse, you can invoking its "Quick Fix".

3. I miss the "Problems" pane in Eclipse, which lists all the issues (errors, warnings, and TODOs) in the project at any time. IDEA has the "Inspect Code" feature, which is great, but it's only snapshot - if you fix an issue, it doesn't disappear from the list, and if you introduce a new issue it doesn't show up - for this you have to manually re-run inspection, which I guess I can do, but it's just one more thing to keep in mind. If it could update continuously like in Eclipse, it would be great.

I don't know if anyone else is bothered by any of this, and I suspect not, but any input on what is possible would be great.

I'm using IntelliJ IDEA 12, languages include Python, PHP, Java and Scala.

Thanks!

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3 comments

Hi Haakon,

  1. I doubt we'll provide error markers at the left editor gutter when there is an otline at the right one. Basically, the right one allows you to see that a file currently opened at the editor has errors/warnings. You can quickly navigate between them via keyboard (see below) or by performing mouse clicks at the error outline elements (we call them error stripes btw);
  2. You can quickly navigate between forwards and backwards between the current file's errors and warnings via F2/Shift+F2. I wrote a small post about that;
  3. Please check this thread about the 'problems' view;


Denis

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I also miss the problem pane feature of eclipse, Inspect Code is painful,  memory intensive and time consuming 

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Agrimgrover, please, check this comment to the corresponding YouTrack feature request. The Project-Wide Analysis feature for Java was implemented in the 2021.2 release, so the latest available IntelliJIDEA 2022.3.2 supports this functionality.

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