June 4, 2019

Plastic SCM is fully compatible with all JetBrains' IDEs. Hurray!

Life is easy when everything is at the reach of your hand. That is why we decided to make Plastic SCM fully integrated with all IntelliJ IDEs! Yes, you read it well, with all 12 IntelliJ Products. Those include IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, PhpStorm, WebStorm, RubyMine, AppCode, CLion, GoLand, DataGrip, Rider, MPS and Android Studio. The updated plug-in is compatible with versions 2019.x, 2018.x, 2017.x and 2016.x of all the IntelliJ Platform products (2020.x versions not compatible yet) and will soon be compatible with previous versions, stay tuned.

JetBrains IntelliJ Products are fantastic development environments. One of Plastic's main goals is to prevent the loss of focus so, if you decide to work on any of Jetbrains' IDEs then, we will bring Plastic functionality there: all of Plastic's functionality can be invoked from the preferred interface.

Remember Plastic is already compatible with TeamCity, JetBrains' CI/CD tool.
Read the more about it here.

Your IDE, your version control

Out of the box you can now branch and merge easily, create new repos and share them accordingly with your team members. The power of Plastic's source control and intuitive GUIs is now invoked and used from your IDE of choice.

Basically, you can now start your project from the IDE without losing track of any change with Plastic. Cycle through all the changes to understand what you've done with the complete changelist. But there is more.

Let's use Rider as an example of the integration. Performing a checkout is a point and click task:

As well as moving from branch to branch:

Plastic features are also available from the context menu of the secondary mouse click as seen below:

But there is also a dedicated pane for all things VCS: local changes to checkin to remote, History and revisions, unversioned files and ignored ones…

One of Plastic's main features, semantic diffing (understanding code structure to reduce integration conflicts), is now embedded in your Rider interface.

From Rider's GUI too the annotated lines and history of the local files can be displayed to understand the projects history.

The new plug is, for the time being, available with Plastic's binary, though it will soon be available in JetBrain's plug-in marketplace. The plug-in can be installed in two ways:

Plastic's installer

During Plastic's installation, the wizard will suggest the possibility to install the IDEA plug-in. The wizard has not been yet updated but you can still go on with that process to install the IntelliJ Platform plugin without any problem. This process will do two things: it will install the plugin in the appropriate folder of your JetBrains IDE installation and it will also install it in a separate folder with the following path ${INSTALL_DIR}/intellij_plugin/plastic4idea.jar. This makes the plugin available to install in any new version of the JetBrains IDE. It will also contain a README file with the steps to follow for the process to be successful.

Install from Disk

From within your IDE you can go to the plugins section and select the option Install Plugins from Disk. The plug-in will be installed in the following folder ${INSTALL_DIR}/intellij_plugin/plastic4idea.jar in which you will also find a README fill with instructions on how to copy the plug-in in the IDE's folder.

Compatibility

As mentioned at the beginning, this plugin is compatible with all IntelliJ Platform products versions 2019.x, 2018.x, 2017.x and 2016.x.

Next steps

As part of the ongoing process of improving Plastic's IntelliJ plug-in we want to make it fully compatible with all the version of any of their platform's products. We would also like to make it easy for anyone to find it and install it. Hence, we are in the process of hosting it and maintaining it in JetBrains' plug-in registry.

We will soon announce more details of the integration with JetBrains IDEA and CLion teams. Stay tuned to our social media channels to know when and where exactly this will happen:

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn




Are you a user of any of IntellIJ Platforms IDEs and you are looking for a new VCS?

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