New Idea 5.0 Feature - The Inspector

by Charles Miller on August 4, 2005

Along with all the other lemmings, this week I upgraded to IntelliJ IDEA 5.0. My short review is that it seems to have lots of cool and interesting new stuff in it, but I haven't got around to using any of it yet.

Anyway, after using the IDE for a few minutes, I noticed this strange little guy sitting at the bottom of the screen:

In the middle of the application toolbar, there is an icon of an official-looking, pixelated head

Curiously, I clicked on him and discovered that he manages the degree to which IDEA will interfere with your viewing of a file.

A preference pane pops up giving you the opportunity to manage whether IDEA will suggest imports, and to what extent it will highlight code

If you turn down the level of code inspection, the Inspector (as I started to call him) will turn his back. It's supposed to indicate he's no longer watching the code, but it looks a little like you've pissed him off by deactivating him, and now he's snubbing you.

Of course, it's obvious that JetBrains have a lot of big plans for this little guy. I mean, once you've got this friendly character sitting on your screen watching over your code, it's only a matter of time before...

...he turns into Clippy.

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