No matter what your technical background as a developer looks like, you’ve probably come across or even used an IDE from JetBrains. Their product line features IDEs for various languages and technologies and they’re all built according to the same schema: Atop an extensible core (“IntelliJ platform”) sits a set of curated extensions that provides all of the “integrated” functionality of the IDE.

But what if you could extend your IDE further with your own plugins? Doing your own plugin for your workflows can improve your productivity drastically. In this post we’ll explore the IntelliJ API and build a simple plugin step-by-step to get you going.