switching from Eclipse to IntelliJ for Groovy/Grails dev

Question

Hi,

I'll be switching from Eclipse to IntelliJ, as I'll be doing some Grails dev soon (and the Groovy/Grails plugins for Eclipse suck).

I've been using IntelliJ for a few hours and can't really figure out how to use it effectively. Is there some kind of an Eclipse mode, which makes it behave similarly to Eclipse, or some kind of a tutorial for Eclipse users that explains what the differences between the two are.

Moreover there seems to be very little information about how to use the Grails support. All I've found so far is this page.

Thanks, Don

Answer 1

Have you enabled the eclipse key-bindings? This is a boon to productivity is you aren't familiar with the IntelliJ bindings.

To do this, just search for 'Keymaps' in the Preferences panel and Eclipse is a dropdown choice (at least this was how things were configured in pre-8.1)

Another thing you will want to check is that you have the JetGroovy plugin installed. This is possible via the plugins part of the preferences.

Once that is in place your project should be sensed as a Grails project.

From there you may want to verify that your per-Project settings is using the GRAILS_HOME which you want it to be using. In pre-8.1 this config in the the Modules config.

Answer 2

Good Tip on the eclipse key-bindings. You might want to try the KeyPromoter plugin - it pops up a window with the associated key command when you manually invoke them

I would recommend taking a minute to read the Intellij-IDEA Refcard to get more familiar with the IDE in general.

Hamlet D'Arcy has a good post on moving from Eclipse to IntelliJ as well as a number of other great posts about IntelliJ and Groovy Support.