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Cover image for How to enable the new UI in Jetbrains products
Alexis C. Gridel
Alexis C. Gridel

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How to enable the new UI in Jetbrains products

(cover image credit to jetbrains.com)

How does it look?

The new experimental UI in Jetbrains product is not currently available, a beta-testing phase was opened to test it
before everyone else. Some new features were introduced with this new experimental UI such as a new font, better
for reading and more clear. It includes additionally a new animation and new scroll animation which is more smooth and
jerky less.

This new experimental UI in Jetbrains products is available to all products from Jetbrains, like Intellij IDEA, Goland,
PHPStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm, Datagrip, and so on... With the latest version, 2022.2 at the moment.

Screenshot of the new Intellij IDE based UI

Screenshot of the new Intellij IDE-based UI, from the new UI blog article of the Jetbrains team

As you can see, there are a ton of new changes such as new UI icons, and a minimalistic look of the user interface, that
makes the IDE cleaner and faster in some ways. If you are a Jetbrains enthusiast, you may have heared about Jetbrains Fleet
. Thus you could see the narrowest difference between both user interfaces.

What are the requirements to enable the new experimental UI?

To enable the new experimental UI, you need to have the latest stable (LTS) version of your Jetbrains product — the
latest current version is 2022.2 —.

What are the benefits of using the new UI?

The new UI looks more minimalistic than the current one, it allows us to code in better conditions, thanks to the new
font and the new scroll animations. That's a life changer, the scroll has drastically changed, and it is so way smoother
than the current one. Furthermore, the new minimalistic user interface makes the code way more readable, thanks to that
you can see the code part you want at any moment. To conclude, it is also really customizable, which allows you to make
the IDE yours.

That is fantastic, but how to enable it in my IDE?

In whether IDE you are using, as long as you are using a Jetbrains product, you can enable this new user interface.
However, if you don't want to do some hacks to enable it, you can wait for the new version that will introduce this new
user interface.

But, if you feel so impatient to use this new UI, please follow these steps :

  1. Go to the actions dropdown menu (CTRL-SHIFT-A) for Windows/Linux or (Command-SHIFT-A) for Mac OS

  2. Search for Registry...

  3. Type "ide.experimental" (even if there is no search bar at the moment)

  4. Check "ide.experimental.ui", "ide.experimental.ui.scroll" and "ide.experimental.ui.inter.font"

  5. Restart as suggested

  6. Here you go, you can now use this new minimalistic and wonderful user interface, please have fun!

In this article you see the benefits and what the new user experimental user interface looks like, but you also saw the
most important thing, how to enable it by yourself.

I hope you like this cool article so please stay tuned for other cool articles in this cool blog !

This article is also available in my personal blog :
https://agdl.dev

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