More Possibilities with Plugins

Any IDE worth its salt is extensible via a plugin architecture. The big names from Microsoft, Eclipse, and JetBrains support plugins as do the smaller, free, and open source IDE projects such as Geany and Ninja IDE. Even vim, which is as bare bones as it gets given it has no GUI, has a plethora of plugins available that allow you to customize your experience beyond the capabilities of the shipped product. In the case of JetBrains IDEs, the plugin architecture is at the heart of everything they build.

Consider that JetBrains started with IntelliJ and from that, built a dozen or so specialty IDEs. The reason this was possible is that their architecture is based on plugins. PyCharm Professional includes all the core functionality of two other IDEs, WebStorm and DataGrip, because those features are simply sets of plugins.

In this chapter, we’re going to discuss some important plugins both from JetBrains and from third-party developers. By the...