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Ultimate IntelliJ Community Setup Guide for 2025

Unlock the full potential of your free IDE. Our 2025 guide covers essential plugins, performance tweaks, and shortcuts for IntelliJ Community Edition.

Alexei Volkov

Senior Software Engineer specializing in JVM languages and developer productivity tools.

September 8, 20257 min read18 views

So, you've downloaded IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition. Fantastic choice! It's one of the most powerful, free Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) on the planet, especially for JVM languages like Java, Kotlin, and Scala. But running it with the default settings is like driving a supercar in a school zone—you're missing out on its true potential.

This isn't just another list of plugins. This is your comprehensive guide to transforming a stock IntelliJ installation into a finely-tuned, blazing-fast development machine for 2025. Whether you're a student, a professional on a budget, or just exploring the JetBrains ecosystem, these steps will save you countless hours and make coding a genuine pleasure.

Initial Setup: Beyond "Next, Next, Finish"

A great setup starts from the very beginning. Instead of just clicking through the installer, let's be intentional.

Start with the JetBrains Toolbox

Before you even install IntelliJ, I strongly recommend downloading the JetBrains Toolbox App. It's a free control panel that manages all your JetBrains IDEs. Why use it?

Effortless Updates: Update, rollback, or install multiple versions of IntelliJ with a single click. No more manual downloads.
Centralized Projects: See all your recent projects in one place, regardless of the IDE version.
Clean Installs: It handles the installation and cleanup process beautifully.

It's a small utility that makes a huge difference in managing your development environment over time.

First Launch Configuration

When you launch IntelliJ for the first time, you're greeted with a customization wizard. Don't rush it.

Theme: Dark (Darcula) or Light? Pick your starting point. We'll talk more about themes later. The new default "Dark" is a great, modern choice.
Default Plugins: IntelliJ asks if you want to disable any plugins. Take a moment here. If you know you'll never touch Android, Ant, or Swing, you can disable them. My advice: When in doubt, leave it enabled. It's easier to disable plugins later from Settings > Plugins > Installed than to figure out why something is missing.

Essential Plugins for Modern Development

The real power of IntelliJ is in its plugin ecosystem. The Community Edition marketplace is vast and free. Go to Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S) > Plugins > Marketplace to find and install these. Here are my non-negotiable plugins for 2025.

General Productivity

Key Promoter X: If you install only one plugin, make it this one. When you use your mouse for an action that has a keyboard shortcut, it flashes a notification telling you what the shortcut is. It's the single best tool for building muscle memory and becoming a keyboard ninja.
.env files support: Almost every modern project uses .env files for managing environment variables. This plugin adds syntax highlighting and completion, which is a massive quality-of-life improvement.
Rainbow Brackets: This plugin gives matching pairs of parentheses, brackets, and braces a unique color, making it infinitely easier to visually parse complex nested code. IntelliJ's recent versions have improved native support, but I still find the plugin's customization superior.

Code Quality & Version Control

GitToolBox: This enhances the built-in Git integration. Its best feature is the inline blame annotation, showing you who last modified a line of code and when, right in the editor. It also adds status information, upstream commit counts, and more. It’s a must-have for any team project.
SonarLint: Connect to a SonarQube or SonarCloud server, or just use it standalone. SonarLint acts like a spell-checker for code quality, highlighting bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells on the fly. It helps you write cleaner, more secure code from the get-go.

Keyboard Shortcuts: Your Productivity Superpower

Relying on the mouse is the biggest bottleneck to your speed. Your goal should be to keep your hands on the keyboard. Here are the shortcuts you should learn today.

Ctrl + Shift + A (Find Action): The master key. Forget where a setting is? Want to run a command? Hit this shortcut and just start typing. It searches everything—actions, settings, files, and more.
Alt + Enter (Show Context Actions): The magic wand. This is the most important shortcut. Is there a red squiggle? An unused variable? A possible refactoring? Place your cursor on it, hit Alt + Enter, and IntelliJ will suggest a fix.
Ctrl + N / Ctrl + Shift + N (Go to Class / Go to File): The fastest way to navigate. Stop browsing the project tree. Just type a few letters of the class or file you want, and you're there.
Alt + F7 (Find Usages): Need to know where a method or class is being used? This is your key. It's far more powerful than a simple text search.
Ctrl + W / Ctrl + Shift + W (Extend / Shrink Selection): This intelligently selects code blocks. Press it once to select the word, again for the statement, again for the method, and so on. It's brilliant for quick refactoring.

Tuning the Look and Feel

You stare at your IDE for hours a day. Make it easy on the eyes.

UI, Font, and Theme

The New UI: Since 2023, IntelliJ has a new, streamlined UI. If you're starting fresh, I highly recommend enabling it under Settings > Appearance & Behavior > New UI. It's cleaner, more modern, and reduces visual clutter.
Font: The default, JetBrains Mono, is excellent. It was designed specifically for coding and includes programming ligatures (where characters like != or => are combined into a single symbol). If you want to try others, Fira Code and Cascadia Code are fantastic alternatives. Enable ligatures in Settings > Editor > Font.
Theme: The built-in themes are great, but if you want more, the Material Theme UI plugin offers a huge collection of themes and customization options.

Performance Tweaks for a Snappy IDE

Is IntelliJ feeling sluggish, especially on large projects? A few tweaks can make a world of difference.

Increase the Heap Size

By default, IntelliJ might not allocate enough memory for itself, leading to lag and garbage collection pauses. You can give it more RAM.

Go to Help > Edit Custom VM Options....
It will create a idea64.exe.vmoptions file if one doesn't exist.
Change the -Xms (initial size) and -Xmx (maximum size) values. A good starting point for a machine with 16GB of RAM or more is:

-Xms1024m
-Xmx4096m

This allocates an initial 1GB and a maximum of 4GB of RAM to IntelliJ. Adjust based on your system's available memory. After saving, restart the IDE.

Disable Unused Plugins (Again)

I'm mentioning this again because it's that important. Every active plugin consumes memory and CPU cycles. Go to Settings > Plugins > Installed and click the "Disable" checkbox for anything you are 100% sure you will not use. Examples for a pure Java/Kotlin backend developer might include Android support, JavaFX, and Swing.

Know About Power Save Mode

If you're on a laptop and battery is critical, you can enable Power Save Mode via File > Power Save Mode. This disables a lot of the on-the-fly inspections and background tasks. It makes the IDE less "intelligent," but much lighter. It's a trade-off, but good to know it exists for emergencies.

Your Turn

An IDE setup is a personal journey, but this guide provides a powerful, professional baseline. By investing an hour into this setup, you're paving the way for a more productive and enjoyable coding experience for years to come.

What are your must-have plugins or hidden-gem settings? Share your tips in the comments below!