What The Commit — Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA

Recently, I came upon whatthecommit.com, a commit message generator. Some of those entries are funny (especially when they are true):

I must have been drunk
Nothing to see here, move along
Removed tests since I can't make them green
Many, many more...

Even Jetbrains had a good laugh about it, posting the typical developer workflow.

This gave me an idea for my first IntelliJ IDEA plugin.

I've had some experience with the Eclipse plugin environment, and I was amazed, how straightforward IntelliJ was compared to that. There was an article describing "how to make an IntelliJ IDEA plugin in 30 minutes". Although I wasn't that fast, I had finished my plugin after only 2 hours (and a couple more of polishing, so I could share it). Here's the basic approach: you can add a button to any toolbar or menu in the whole application, get the current context (e.g. the editor) and make a modification. And that's how it looks like:

What The Commit — Screenshot

Push the button to load a random commit message. The plugin can be used within any Jetbrains product (IntelliJ, WebStorm, PyCharm, ...), and installed via the plugin manager ("File" → "Settings" → "Plugins" → "Browse repositories" → "What The Commit").

You can check out the source code at GitHub and leave a rating in the plugin repository if you like it.