Filed under: Tools, — Tags: Class header, IntelliJ IDEA, JetBrains — Thomas Sundberg — 2014-10-24
My weapon of choice when it comes to editors is without question IntelliJ IDEA. It is great and behaves as I want and usually expects. It has, however, one feature that I find annoying and that I always remove.
IDEA will automatically insert a header with my user name and the date when I created a new class. I use version control so this information is never important. Adding a user name implies code ownership. Code ownership is against one principle I think is very important, collective code ownership. It is a core principle in XP with the goal to make sure that every developer feels that it is ok to work on all code in a project.
The header IDEA inserts used to include where to find it so you easily could find and modify it. Today, when I set up a new environment at a new customer, I noticed that the template had changed. It didn't tell me where to find the template. It looked like below:
/**
* Created by ${USER} on ${DATE}.
*/
My question now became, where is this defined? I found it after some searching. On a Windows host I had to follow this path:
File | Settings | File and Code Template | Includes | File Header
I will probably not find it again so I write this as a reminder to myself.
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