Making yourself at home is essential for productivity. Whether that's using your favorites extensions in your favorite editor or having the right height for your chair and desk, we all have our personal preferences.

Today, I would like to share some small changes I do every time I have a fresh installation of IntelliJ IDEA.

Note: Any of the following configurations can be used on any IntelliJ based IDEs, like: Riders, Webstorm, Android Studio, PHPStorm, etc.

Changing the default font

Fira Code has quickly become my favorite because not only does it read well, but has support for font ligatures, which makes certain symbols combine or alter their way of being rendered while you are coding.

In order to so:

1. Open the Settings window in the File menu or by pressing CTRL + ALT + S/Command + , on Windows or MacOS respectively.
2. On the left panel, select the Editor category and the click on Font.

Now, luckily for us, every JetBrain's IDE comes with Fira Code installed by default, so we don't have to do anything other than selecting it from the Font's dropdown menu.

Note: If you like the way font ligatures look like, make sure to also check the Enable font ligatures on that window.

Here's how my settings look like:

To know more about it, checkout their GitHub's repository:

Removing case sensitivity

The default behaviour is that in order for the Editor's auto completion to pop up for classes names, we need to write it's name starting with a capital letter, which to me is a little bit cumbersome, and I find that without this the IDE still does a great job at predicting what I want to type.

To be able to do this, we have to:

1. Open the Settings window in the File menu or by pressing CTRL + ALT + S/Command + , on Windows or MacOS respectively.
2. On the left panel, select the Editor category, expand the General menu and choose the Code Completion option.
3. Select the None option from the Case sensitive completion dropdown.

Example:

I made a Pizza class and as I'm making a new instance of it, the auto completion pops up:

Now go ahead and try it out for yourself and see if it works for you :)

Helpful plugins

These days, IDEs come with so many helpful features out of the box, but these plugins can be that cherry on top of your delicious ice cream:

.ignore

by Jakub Chrzanowsk

I use this one to automatically find files that are not being tracked by Git and add them to my .gitignore. It can even detect if your project doesn't have a .gitignore file and create it for you.

Markdown support

by Valentin Fondaratov, Anna Kutarba, Dmitry Krasilschikov

This one adds both support for .md files (like README, CONTRIBUTING) that are commonly used in Git repositories with a previewer as a side panel that let's you see how everything looks while you write your Markdown.

Aaand that's pretty much it

I also like to play around with a few keyboard shortcuts here and there, but I try not to customize it too much in order to reduce any frustration from me or others when switching from one computer to the other.