Darek Kay's picture
Darek Kay
Solving web mysteries

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.

What The Commit — Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA