Autocompletion of @author in Intellij

Question

I'm migrating from Eclipse to Intellij Idea. One thing I couldn't figure out yet is autocompletion of the @author JavaDoc tag. When typing @a in Eclipse, there are two proposals:

@author - author name
@author

How do I achieve the first proposal in Intellij (is it even possible?)? And if it's possible, how do I change the template of what is inserted for the author name placeholder?

Answer 1

You can work around that via a Live Template.

Go to Settings -> Editor -> Live Templates, click the Plus Icon Button (on the right).

In the "Abbreviation" field, enter the string that should activate the template (e.g. @a), and in the "Template Text" area enter the string to complete (e.g. @author - My Name). Set the "Applicable context" to Java (Comments only maybe) and set a key to complete (on the right).

I tested it and it works fine, however IntelliJ seems to prefer the inbuild templates, so "@a + Tab" only completes "author". Setting the completion key to Space worked however.

To change the user name that is automatically inserted via the File Templates (when creating a class for example), can be changed by adding

-Duser.name=Your name

to the idea.exe.vmoptions or idea64.exe.vmoptions (depending on your version) in the IntelliJ/bin directory.

Restart IntelliJ