I’ve been a fan of Intellij IDEA for years, since a friend introduced me to it. It’s by far the best Java IDE around (this coming from a guy whose IDE used to be a combination of Emacs, “find” and “grep”). I (or my properly, my employer) have gladly paid each year to get the latest version of this awesome tool, along with its excellent tech support.

But it’s kind of absurd that IDEA, now entering its 10th year of existence, still does not support having multiple editor windows. Yes, you can split the editor window horizontally and vertically, within the same window, but you cannot create two physical windows in which to view code side-by-side. This leads to absurdities like this:

Yes, that’s a picture of the Intellij editor stretched across two LCDs.

It turns out there is a feature request for this in their tracker. Can you believe that it’s been languishing there for over four years?

If you’re an Intellij user, please create yourself an account on their tracker and vote for this issue.