IDEA candy - custom context menu

Table of contents

• Foreword;


• The tip;

Foreword

IDEA provides a great number of features and is very customizable. Today I'm going to talk about ability to customize context menus for your needs and reduce necessity to use a mouse even more.

The tip

Suppose you use particular actions rather often and want to be able to invoke them quickly. One solution is to assign dedicated shortcut to every action but number of convenient key combinations is not too big and most of them are already assigned to the useful actions. IntelliJ IDEA has a solution for that - custom quick lists. Here is a detailed instruction:

1. Say, I realize that I frequently use set of vcs-related operations. I want to be able to call them quickly. First of all, create new custom quick list:
   
   


2. Next step is to assign that newly created quick list to the convenient shortcut. My choice is 'Ctrl+Shift+Q' because it's rather convenient and is not used at default IDEA keymap:
   
   


3. Save the changes and we're done. Now it's possible to quickly invoke all of the actions configured for the quick list. Press assigned shortcut ('Ctrl+Shift+Q' at our example) and custom context menu appears:
   
   

The feature becomes very useful when you get accustomed to it a little. For example, I automatically press the following sequence to see file history: 'Ctrl+Shift+Q Enter'; 'Ctrl+Shift+Q down Enter' for 'annotate' etc.