Linking Check-in Comments to Issues in Tracker

How many times have you blamed your own laziness having found some highly meaningful check-in comment, like "fixed" or "done"? Even if you knew what it meant at the time of writing, after a while you will be unable to recall what has been done and why, and whether it reduces the backlog of your bugs or not ...

IntelliJ IDEA leaves you no excuse for not writing check-in comments. You have to configure navigation to your issues tracker just once. Then, every time you commit your changes, type a matching string - IDEA will take care of replacing it with a link to the respective issue.

Let's look how it's done. First, open the Version Control dialog (Ctrl+Alt+S, 3) and in the Issue Navigation tab define a regular expression, describing your typical comment. For example, such comment can contain a number of letters and digits, separated with a dash, to denote project code and issue number: [A-Z]+\-\d+. Next, type an expression that will replace matching strings in your check-in comments and provide navigation to the issues.

Now, when you commit your changes related to an issue, enter issue number to match the regular expression:

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When later you will look through the changes in the repository, you will be able to easily jump from the check-in comments to the related issues in your tracker:

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