Busy Plugin Developers Newsletter – Spring 2023

Despite being a plugin itself, ReSharper serves as an incredible platform for plugin creation. ReSharper’s development team uses the dependency injection approach to design every aspect of the product. That means that any component of ReSharper is like a building block that can be overridden with plugins, opening up virtually limitless possibilities for fine-tuning every aspect of ReSharper’s behavior.  As a plugin author, you get to take advantage of each and every component that ReSharper developers themselves use. But there’s a flip side to such freedom. Following the “each p

JetBrains Marketplace provides a platform for plugin developers to distribute their plugins to millions of JetBrains users worldwide. If you’re planning to release a new plugin on JetBrains Marketplace, you might want a specific release date in order to coordinate your launch activities. With that in mind, we’ve released a new feature to help you publish plugins on JetBrains Marketplace without making them available to the general public.  Read on to learn how to hide your plugin from public view until you are ready to release it, and discover some key things to consider for a smooth p

JetBrains introduces a public preview of the Polaris plugin for plugin developers – a code search tool embedded into IntelliJ IDEA.

If you are distributing your plugin as open-source software on JetBrains Marketplace, it is your obligation to provide a valid source code link. Why is providing the source code important? TL;DR: Providing access to the source code is a legal requirement.One of the defining characteristics of open-source software is that its source code is made freely available to users. It is also in your best interest to take care of this. A license agreement protects your intellectual property and establishes the rights of all parties involved with the software, including the author, end users, and ot

On JetBrains Marketplace, most plugins are distributed as OSS software. Choosing an appropriate open-source license can be daunting, especially for individual plugin developers who don’t have a team of lawyers. There’s a variety of licenses with different conditions and implications. To help you get a handle on open-source licensing, we’ve prepared a short introduction that may help plugin authors and all other OSS software developers choose the right license for their tools. What is an open-source license? Open-source licenses are non-proprietary licenses that provide certain freedoms,

Today, we are speaking with Mohammed Baig, developer of the NextSketch2 plugin, a visual diagramming tool integrated with JetBrains IDEs. Let’s get to know Mohammed! Can you tell us a bit about yourself? How did you get into programming, and what are you working on now? I first got started with programming after reading an old copy of “Head First Java” that my dad stored far away on his shelves. It took some time to learn the language and start building lots of weird, throw-away projects before I started working on real ones. But my first exposure to programming was for a Robotics c

Marketplace updates: ⭐ Improved visibility for plugin resources  On your plugin page, you can add links to your website, issue tracker, documentation, and any other relevant resources. These links used to be displayed in the Additional Information section at the bottom of a plugin page, but now you can see them right after the plugin description. Also, starting with the 2022.3 versions of IntelliJ-based IDEs, users can view these links in the Plugin Manager within their IDEs. ⭐️ Reporting inappropriate plugins If you come across a plugin that has some

The more we work on a tool, the more intuitive and easy to use it seems. This is why documentation is sometimes postponed to the last minute, or even scrapped completely. Customers are left to figure out for themselves what the tool can do. However, documentation benefits even a small team, especially at an early stage of a product’s development. Documentation helps to flatten the learning curve. Fewer users will drop off because they fail to find a feature. It takes the burden off support, which is a big advantage for a small team.Online documentation improves content marketing and

JetBrains IntelliJ-based IDEs are powerful, feature-rich developer tools with countless  extensibility options. Any user can add features to the IDEs by installing plugins from JetBrains Marketplace, where you can find extensions that cover most aspects of your work. The range of available plugins includes integrations with code review services, CI/CD, static analysis, productivity tools, various frameworks and languages, as well as UI themes, custom progress bars, and language packs. According to The State of Developer Ecosystem 2022, tool integrations are among the most popular types

Read this Newsletter to learn about the latest JetBrains Marketplace news and plugin development tooling updates.

This is a guest blog post by Issam Guissouma, developer of the Nx Console Idea plugin.