Developer Tip | IntelliJ Issue Navigation

​ Mathijs den Burger

​ 2017-11-10

Every once in a while I find a nice trick that makes my daily developer live a little easier or more pleasant. I usually share these tricks via an internal email with "Dev Tip" as the subject.

But since we'd like to open up the Hippo Labs to a broader range of topics I'd like to share with you the following tip that I thought comes in really handy.

I discovered an IntelliJ gem I think is worth sharing. It's called "Issue Navigation". It makes the JIRA issues in your commit messages clickable!

First, you need to create a list of the so-called issue navigation patterns. According to IntelliJ, an issue navigation pattern maps an issue ID pattern in commit messages with the URL addresses of the referenced issues. This enables you to navigate from committed changes to issues related to these changes.

As soon as IntelliJ IDEA encounters a match to the issue ID pattern in a commit message, the match is displayed as a link in the Version Control tool window.

If you mention several issues, all of them will be displayed as links. Clicking such link opens the matching issue in the default browser.

I hope you like this small tip and it makes your daily developer live a little easier. You can read all about it in more detail on IntelliJ's documentation.