NaviActionPad is the first plugin I developed for IntelliJIDEA. I was playing around with IDEA’s plugin system several times before, but never produced anything worth publishing. Then three weeks ago the idea for NaviActionPad came into my mind and only two days later I had finished the first rough version.

NaviActionPad is firstly a navigation plugin. It allows you to navigate through a project really fast. The plugin is inspired partly by the navigation bar which is included in IDEA and by LaunchBar, an application launcher for Mac OSX.

Then as you are navigating through your project you can execute actions on the elements of the project without having to search them in IDEA’s menus or memorizing the shortcuts for them. I think it’s a nice concept and use NaviActionPad myself when developing with IDEA. Take a look at the website for screenshots and a walkthrough.

NaviActionPad relies heavily on IDEA’s PSI (short for program structure interface), which is a joy to use. PSI presents the developer of a plugin with an easy to understand view on the current project and its contents. Although IDEA’s OpenAPI (That’s the part of IDEA that is opened – not obfuscated – to the plugin developer – hence the name) is badly documented, it didn’t take me very long to find the right classes and methods I needed. Although they lack documentation the classes and methods are named very well. So you can guess what they probably will do. I my case they almost always did what I guessed they would do.