Essential PyCharm (Intellij) Plugins To Improve Productivity

As per 2019 JetBrains survery, PyCharm is the most widely used(36%) IDE for Python development. Even though PyCharm comes with a lot of built-in features, there are a lot of plugins available for PyCharm and other Intellij IDEs. In this article, we will see some plugins which will boost our productivity during development.

Ace Jump

To move caret to a particular position in the editor without mouse, AceJump plugin will be useful. It allows to quickly navigate the caret to any position in the editor.

GitToolBox

GitToolBox provides a lot of additional features like inblame support, status bar widget, commit dialog, branch name completion, etc.

Grep Console

When running a django/flask server or any Python script which generates a lot of output, it is hard to filter specific output on console. Grep Console can filter or highlight output based on specific conditions which makes it easier to debug the code.

Highlight Bracket Pair

Instead of manually scanning where a bracket starts/ends, Highlight Bracket Pair will automatically highlight the bracket pairs based on cursor position.

Key Promoter

If you are new to PyCharm or an experienced user who is using mouse instead of key board shortcuts, Key Promoter will show relevant key board shortcut when mouse is used inside IDE. This provides an easy way to learn keyboard shortcuts faster.

Rainbow Brackets

Highlight Bracket Pair will hightlight the bracket pair around the cursor. When there are multiple bracket pairs deeply nested, Rainbow Brackets will highlight matching bracket pairs with matching rainbow colors.

Save Actions

Instead of manually optimizing imports or reformatting code when changes are made, we can use Save Actions which will automatically run a set of actions on every file save.

String Manipulation

To convert lower case letters to upper case letter, String manipulation plugin will be useful. In addition to lower/upper case conversion, it also provides options to convert to cameCase, kebab-case, PascalCase etc.

These are some plugins which will boost developers productivity while writing and debugging code in PyCharm or other JetBrains IDE.