"map." showing in structure panel instead of method name
I have my IntelliJ IDEA Structure panel set to “Always Select Opened Element”. Normally, when I click on a line of code in the editor window, the structure panel will jump to and highlight the method containing that line of code, just like it is supposed to. Perfect!
But sometimes, thankfully rarely, clicking on a line of code takes the structure panel to something called “map.” instead of the method in question. It looks like this:
What is going on there? That method just above the “map” has nothing to do with the method in which my cursor resides and is not close to the method in question (they're separated by about 2000 lines of code and multiple other methods).
If I click on that “map” the editor jumps to a faintly highlighted (in the new Islands dark theme) comment line in some_method (but without a cursor showing). That comment line is shown here:
Curiously, if I edit that line to something like:
Then the structure panel now says:
If I change the first word of that comment line from “region” to, say, “monkey”, or likely anything other than “region”, then all this bizarre behavior goes away and the structure panel acts normally.
Very bizarre. Sounds like a very weird bug. Can it be fixed?
Thank you.
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As a follow up, I have discovered that I can add a comment almost anywhere in the code (other methods, other classes) that begins with the word “region” to cause the same bizarre behavior in the structure panel. It must be the first word after the two slashes, with or without spaces before the word. Then whatever appears after the word “region” shows up in the structure panel.
In other words, I can add a new line with the comment “// region shit” almost anywhere in my code to get “shit” to show up in the structure panel.
I have been observing this behavior for the last several releases, including the new 2025.3.
You are welcome to vote for this feature request to make the setting togglable: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-222696
Thank you. I have voted for that issue. But please note that I added a comment that the bigger issue is that the structure panel sometimes jumps to that region anchor instead of jumping to the name of the method in which I clicked. That is much worse behavior, and I would call it a bug, not a feature request, than the mere presence of the region anchor in the structure view.