A second update this year for IntelliJ IDEA,  JetBrains' Java IDE for web, desktop and mobile development, has been released with a mix of fixes and new features.

The new release, IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2, has a new combined Watches and Variables view for the debugger, part of a drive to increase the amount of space while not losing information for developers. 

You can also use multiline expressions in new places including the Condition and Evaluate and log fields in Breakpoint settings.

One useful improvement is the ability to apply patches. If you copy your patch into the Clipboard and then switch to the IDE, you'll be automatically prompted to apply it. If a file has been moved or renamed since a patch was created for it, the IDE will attempt to work out which file the patch should be applied to, or you can manually choose the file to apply the patch to. Where changes have been made since a patch was created, if the original can't be found, you'll be prompted to apply the changes from the patch using a Merge-like dialog. You can also compare it to your local version using the Show Diff action.

On the UI front, The editor has added support for fonts with ligatures – symbols composed of two or more other symbols. Breadcrumbs for Java code have also been added. Until now breadcrumbs were only available in HTML and XML code, where the IDEA developers say:

"they have proven to be super handy for tracking of the editing position as well as traversing the tag tree."

Now breadcrumbs work for Java, too, where instead of tags they let you navigate through classes, lambda expressions and methods.

In terms of specific language support features, Java programmers will find that support for JUnit 5 has been added in this release. JUnit 5 is the latest version of the Java unit testing framework. Spring Framework support has been improved, with an inspection that offers to automatically replace field injection with constructor injection. The developers have also added advanced support for Spring Cache including navigation; inspections; syntax highlighting, and code completion.

JavaScript improvements mean that the IDE helps you write ES6 code, but also to convert to it JavaScript of older versions. The new intention lets you replace normal anonymous functions with arrow functions and shorthand arrow functions.

The IDE now understands React component props defined with propTypes and offers code completion and navigation for them. For AngularJS 2, the developers have added some live templates. There's also support for various features of TypeScript 2.0 including optional class members, readonly property, never type, this function type, and global module export declaration among others.

More Information

Intellij IDEA Blog

What's New In IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2 

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