Can Intellij IDEA (14 Ultimate) generate regex based TODO-comments?

Question

A few years back i worked in a company where i could press CTRL+T and a TODO-comment was generated - say my ID to be identified by other developers was xy45 then the generated comment was:

//TODO (xy45): 

Is something available from within Intellij 14 Ultimate or did they write their own plugin for it?

What i tried: Webreserach, Jetbrais documentations - it looks like its not possible out of the box (i however ask before i write a plugin for it) or masked by the various search results regarding the TODO-view (due to bad research skills of mine).

Answer 1

I suggest to reconsider using that practice at all. Generally you should not include redundant information which is easily and more reliably accessible through your Version Control System (easily available in Idea directly in editor using Annotate feature). It is similiar to not using javadoc tag @author as the information provided with it is often outdated inaccurate and redundant. Additionaly, I don´t think author of TODO is that much valuable information. Person who will solve the issue will often be completly different person and the TODO should be well documented and descriptive anyway. When you find your own old TODO, which is poorly documented, you often don't remember all the required information even if you were the author.

However, instead of adding author's name, a good practice is to create a task in you issue management system and add identifier of this task to the description of the todo. This way you have all your todos in evidence at one place, you can add additional information to the task, track progress, assign it etc. My experience is that if you don´t use this, todos tend to stay in the code forever and after some time no one remembers clearly the details of the problem. Additionaly, author mentioned in the todo is often already gone working for a different company.

Annotated TODO with issue ID

Answer 2

Found something that works quite similar but is not boundable to a shortcut:

File -> Settings -> Live Templates

I guess the picture says enoth to allow customization (consult the Jetbrains documentation for more possibilities). E.g. browse to the Live Template section within the settings, add a new Live Template (small green cross, upper right corner in the above picture) and set the context where this Live Template is applicable.

Note: Once you defined the Live Template to be applicable within Java (...Change in the above image where the red exclamation marks are shown) context you can just type "t", "todo" and hit CTRL+Space (or the shortcut you defined for code completion).

Answer 3

There is no built-in feature in IntelliJ IDEA to generate such comments, so it looks like they did write their own plugin.