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Intellij IDEA

IDEA 8: Buggy as Hell

Jan 14th, 2009
by plightbo.
4 comments

Here is a running list of all the bugs I’ve come across with IntelliJ IDEA 8 so far. Some of these may actually be thoughtful changes from the behavior in version 7, but they are annoying so I’m calling them bugs :)

  • Can no longer autocomplete lowercase for enums. For example, typing “TimeUnit.sec” does not prompt for TimeUnit.SECONDS. This used to work in IDEA 7 and is inconsistent with autocomplete for methods (“getcon” prompts “getConnectionTimeout”).
  • Pasting a block of code no longer always asks asks me to auto-import the classes needed to make the code work. It does in some cases, but not in others.
  • I don’t remember searching by files (Command-Shift-N) showing me .java files unless there was no other match for my search. This annoys me, since now when I search for “foo” I expect to see foo.jsp to be selected first (it’s listed first), but FooActionBean.java is listed at the bottom but sometimes it is preselected, making me have to use the arrow keys.
  • Sometimes, especially on more complex pages, HTML auto tag closing (ie: “<ul>” causes “</ul>” to be inserted) doesn’t work for all tags. I’ve seen cases where it works for <li> but not for <ul> or <div>.
  • <title> tags don’t get indented in a <head> tag unless there is additional content in the head section. This may have been done on purpose, but I don’t like it. I end up having to correct the indentation myself or running the auto-format, which is always risky.
  • Pasting HTML/JSP snippets from one part of a JSP to another part causes the indentation to be completely lost (shifted all the way to the left). In the previous versions, IDEA was smart enough to paste in and match the correct indentation level for the context I just pasted in to.
  • When renaming/moving a class, any JSP tag that references it (ie: “<s:link beanclass=’foo.Bar’>…”) will get HTML escaped, completely breaking the behavior and introducing a bug in to my code. Worst yet: it won’t even tell me, which is totally breaks my trust of IDEA’s traditionally excellent refactoring tools.
  • Related to the above – when tying a fully qualified class name in a JSP tag, typing lower case letters (“foobar”) will prompt the class “FooBar”. This is good. But when I press enter on the selected class, the resulting text is all lower case “foobar” rather than the actual class name. This is bad!
  • UPDATE 1: When a class doesn’t exist and IDEA prompts you to create the class, it suggests a bad default module. It used to suggest the module that the current code was in (which logically makes sense), but now it’s suggesting a different module, which I didn’t catch at first. I’m loosing my trust with IDEA :(
  • UPDATE 2: When debugging, the “Run to Cursor” feature seems to never work. Hovering my mouse over it produces a very nice “null” tooltip.
  • UPDATE 3: Clicking on the left margin on a blank line produces an error claiming that “Method breakpoints may dramatically slow down debugging” – despite the fact that I didn’t add a method-level breakpoint.
  • UPDATE 4: Command-P does not show parameter information for Pattern.compile unless the cursor is placed immediately to the right of the opening parenthesis. It appears this is due to the internal support for syntax highlighting of regexes.
  • UPDATE 4: Related to the last one – normally IDEA is smart enough to know that when I type a double quote and I’m inside of a string, it will not add a new one and instead will replace the double quote character to the right of my cursor. This doesn’t work in regexes.
  • UPDATE 5: The debugger seems incredibly slow now. Perhaps it’s from one of those phantom “method breakpoints” it thinks I’ve turned on, but the Frames, Debugger, and Watches tabs are now really slow. So slow I can watch them render and evaluate – something that never happened in IDEA 7.
  • UPDATE 6: As we all know, pressing dot will prompt the list of methods and fields available to call. I use this all the time – so much so that I put the auto-complete time down from the default of 1000ms to 0ms. Unfortunately, a regression from 7 to 8 happened that breaks chained method calls using this feature. For example, typing “mapEntry.” will prompt me for “getValue()” and “getKey()”. If I navigate using the arrow keys to “getValue()” and then press “.” again, I expect to now see the method list for the instance in the Map.Entry value. Instead, “getValue().” is completed, but then I have to press control-space to get the next list. Lame!
  • UPDATE 7: Pasting in the code “Gson gson = new Gson();” prompts me to import the “Gson” on both the right hand side and the left hand side.
  • UPDATE 8: Despite having the SQL support plugin enabled on both my laptop and my desktop, only my laptop is doing any sort of SQL syntax support for *.sql files. Very odd.

There are a lot more and I’ll update this list as I find them. This was just the ones I wrote down while coding this morning. Got some of your own to share? Add them in the comments and I’ll roll ‘em in here to share with the JetBrains team.