Install

The fastest way to get idea is the Homebrew tap. If you’d rather build from source, a single just recipe handles it. This page covers both, plus shell completion and upgrades.

Homebrew tap (recommended)

brew install sahil87/tap/idea

The tap gives you a prebuilt idea binary on your $PATH, managed by Homebrew — so upgrades, version pinning, and uninstall all go through brew. This is the path most people want: nothing to compile, and idea update (see Upgrading) can self-upgrade through the same tap later.

Manual build from a clean checkout

If you’d rather build it yourself (no Homebrew, or you want to track main), clone the repo and run the install recipe:

just local-install

Prerequisites: Go and just.

This builds the binary (stamped with the git describe version) and copies it to ~/.local/bin/idea. Make sure that directory is on your $PATH — for example:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"   # add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc

To build without installing (binary lands at ./bin/idea), use just build.

Shell completion

idea shell-init <shell> emits an eval-safe tab-completion snippet for your shell. It tab-completes subcommands, flags, and the bare idea <text> shorthand. Supported shells: zsh, bash, fish, powershell.

Wire it into your rc file once:

eval "$(idea shell-init zsh)"   # in ~/.zshrc
eval "$(idea shell-init bash)"  # in ~/.bashrc

For fish and powershell, the snippet documents its own install line in a banner comment at the top of the output:

idea shell-init fish | source                 # current session
idea shell-init fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/idea.fish   # persistent

idea shell-init powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression   # add to $PROFILE

The zsh snippet lazy-loads compinit if you haven’t initialised the completion system yet, so it’s safe to drop into an rc file unconditionally.

Have other sahil87 tools? shll shell-install wires up the shell integrations and autocompletions for all of them at once — see shll shell-install.

Upgrading

If you installed via Homebrew, upgrade in place with:

idea update

This refreshes the tap metadata, checks the installed version against the latest published release, and runs brew upgrade only when a newer version exists — if you’re already current it prints Already up to date and exits. (Pass --skip-brew-update to skip only the tap-metadata refresh; faster, but it may miss a just-published release.) If idea was not installed via Homebrew, the command explains how to update manually instead — for a manual build, re-run just local-install from an updated checkout.

Next, see the workflows guide for worktree-aware behavior, the fab-kit loop, and the backlog file format.