IntelliJ IDEA, was developed by JetBrains and is an integrated environment for Java programming language development, with many features such as maintainable code and High Performance. It has good applications in intelligent code assistants, automatic code prompts, refactoring, J2EE support, various version tools (Git, SVN, etc.), JUnit, CVS integration, code analysis, innovative GUI design, etc.
IntelliJ IDEA offers a free Community Edition and a paid Ultimate Edition. The free Community version only supports a few languages such as Java and basic IDE features, while full-featured commercial version also supports multiple programming like HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Python and Go.
Now let’s download and install the IDEA, the steps are as follows.
Go to the IDEA official download page (the official website address is https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/), click DOWNLOAD.
IntelliJ IDEA is a cross-platform development tool that supports Windows, Mac, Linux and other operating systems. The ultimate version has more comprehensive functions, here we choose to download the ultimate version. Then click Download link.
IntelliJ IDEA provides two editions, Ultimate edition and Community edition. The community edition is free, open-source edition. The Ultimate edition is the business edition, offering an excellent set of tools and features. For detailed information about the differences between the two versions, you can refer to the version comparison matrix (as shown in Figure 3). Figure 3 shows what programming languages are supported by the two versions.
You may need to register after clicking the download button. Then, the browser will automatically download it, just wait for the download to complete.
After the download is complete, you will get an IntelliJ IDEA installation package, double-click to execute this file, click Next to start the installation.
Set the installation directory of IDEA. It is recommended not to install it on the system disk (usually the disk C is the system disk). In this example, we choose to install it on the disk D.
Choose an appropriate desktop shortcut according your OS version. If you need to associate the ‘.java’ and ‘.groovy’ file with IntelliJ IDEA, check the box.
The options in the above figure are explained as follows:
- Create Desktop Shortcut: Create a desktop shortcut icon, it is recommended to check 64-bit launcher;
- Update context menu: Whether to add the “Open folder as project” to the right mouse button, check as required;
- Create Associations: Associated file format, if you could like use a lightweight text editor(such as Sublime Text, EditPlus, etc.) to open these files, don’t check the box;
- Download and install 32-bit JetBrains Runtime: Download and install JetBrains’ JRE. If you have installed JRE, you do not need to check this one;
- Update PATH variable (restart needed): This option allows adding /bin to your system %PATH% so that you can start the launcher from any folder by just entering idea (webstorm, etc) in cmd console
After choose the start menu folder, click Install and wait for the installation finished.
Wait for the installation progress bar to reach 100%, click Finish. Now the installation of IntelliJ IDEA is complete. You can check the Run IntelliJ IDEA option to run IDEA after closing this window.
When you run IntelliJ IDEA first time, it will automatically ask you to configure IntelliJ IDEA (select the interface style, etc.), you can configure it according to your own preferences. you can also close the config window, IntelliJ IDEA will run on the default configuration.