FileBrowser is a plugin for IntelliJIDEA.
IntelliJ IDEA is not only a great Java IDE, it's also very useful as an editor for CSS stylesheets, HTML
and any sort of XML documents. It's also quite useful as a general purpose text editor for text files.
Unfortunately opening files outside of an IDEA project is a great pain. There is no easy way to browse
the whole contents of the local hard drives. This is where FileBrowser comes in.
FileBrowser provides a convenient way of browsing the local drives on a computer from inside IDEA and
of opening files in IDEA. Take a look at the walkthrough to see how it works.
FileBrowser can be downloaded directly inside IDEA through IDEA's plugin manager or from the
IntelliJ IDEA Plugins site.
The best way to show how FileBrowser works is by showing it in action.
This is the tool window of FileBrowser. By default it is on the left side of IDEA. In the center you see
the listing of the contents of it's current working folder.
You can navigate through the folder hierachy
by double clicking on a folder, by pressing ENTER while a folder is selected or
by pressing the CursorLeft and Cursor Right keys.
CursorLeft navigates to the parent folder while Cursor-Right
navigates into the selected folder.
You can open a file by double-clicking on it, by pressing ENTER or
Cursor Right while the file is selected.
The tool bar at the top of the tool window provides the following functions and settings.
- Synchronize
- Press this icon to update the current folder contents listing.
- Favorites
- This provides a menu for favorites managing
- Go To
- Opens a dialog where a folder can be chosen to jump directly to
- Go Up
- Opens a menu with all ancestors of the current folder.
- Autoscroll to Source
- Whenever a file is selected in FileBrowser, the file is opened in an editor.
- Autoscroll from Source
- Makes FileBrowser always show the parent folder of the currently edited file.
- Group folders
- Makes FileBrowser group the folders in a listing at the top of it
- Focus editor
- If this is activated, FileBrowser transfers the focus to the editor when it opens a file. Otherwise
the focus stays in FileBrowser.
- Don't show unknown files
- Activate this to make FileBrowser show only files of types IDEA knows.
The favorites menu allows to add the current folder to the project or application favorites and
to remove the current folder from any of them..
Project favorites are specific to each project while application favorites are generally available.
The first region in the menu after the managing functions contains the project favorites while the second
one contains the application favorites.
The "Go Up" menu contains all ancestors of the current folder. Just select one of them to jump
directly to that folder..
While editing a file, you can always press ALT F1 to choose a target in
which to select the file.
This is standard IDEA functionality, but now FileBrowser is also available as a target.
You can always filter the items in the list.
Just start typing. You can see the current filter below the list and the list is automatically filtered
while you're typing. The filter text will change its color to red if applying the filter yields no results.
Press CTRL+Backspace to remove the last character of the filter.
All elements that somewhere contain the filter string pass the filter test.
Right-clicking inside the file list, brings up a popup menu with some common file operations
Besides the simple operations like Delete
or Rename, it's also possible to Copy or
Move files to other folders.
When you execute one of those actions a dialog will open where you can choose the destination folder
for the operation. The combobox for the destination folder contains the last 10 chosen folders and all project
and application favorites. The Browse-Button at the right of the combobox brings up a dialog where the folder
can be chosen..
For each action available in FileBrowser you can define keyboard and mouse shortcuts in IDEA's
keymap settings. In the tree on the left side open the Plugins node and then the FileBrowser node to
see all available actions. Some actions have default shortcuts. Those are
- Delete: Del
- Mark: F4
- Copy: F5
- Move: F6
- Rename: shift F6
- Add to application favorites: ALT A
- Add to project favorites: ALT P
You can drag and drop a file from outside IDEA into FileBrowser and FileBrowser will show the parent folder
of the dropped file.
You can drag and drop a file from FileBrowser into an application outside IDEA which will initiate
a copy action or make the application open that file in some way. Windows Explorer would copy the file while
Firefox would display it.