JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3 Release Highlights

Last week JetBrains released the major 2023.3 version of its IDEs, bringing a host of new features and improvements aimed at boosting developer productivity.

The long‑awaited AI Assistant preview has ended and the feature is now generally available, offering context‑aware code generation, project‑aware AI actions, and an AI‑powered diff viewer.

IntelliJ IDEA 2023.3 adds full support for the latest Java 21 language features, including virtual threads, record patterns, switch expression pattern matching, serialization collections, string templates, and scoped values.

A new "Run to Cursor" embedded option in the debugger lets users execute code up to a specific line, either via the UI or the ⌥F9 shortcut.

A floating toolbar now appears next to selected code, providing quick access to extract, surround, reformat, comment, and other context actions, with customizable visibility through the Settings.

The Ultimate edition bundles the Kubernetes plugin, enabling out‑of‑the‑box development, deployment, debugging, and management of Kubernetes‑based applications directly from the IDE.

Several user‑experience refinements were made, such as hiding the main toolbar in the default view mode, a new "Default" layout option for tool windows, colored editor tabs reflecting project view colors, a refreshed macOS icon, and a shortcut for Speed Search.

Productivity enhancements include faster Gradle imports (no automatic source JAR download) and quicker Maven imports for all projects.

Performance improvements feature the default enablement of shared JDK index downloads to speed up IDE startup.

Additional framework and technology support now covers OAuth 2.0, URL path auto‑completion, enhanced JSON request body completion in the HTTP client, Spring 6.1, Spring GraphQL, Kafka integration, OpenAPI 3.1 and Swagger UI 5.0 previews, Quarkus and Micronaut beans, among many others.