10 Must‑Have JetBrains IDE Extensions to Tackle Technical Debt

1. RefactorInsight

RefactorInsight enhances code refactoring for Java and Kotlin, allowing detection of refactoring in pull requests, marking commits that contain refactoring, viewing refactoring in specific Git log entries, and browsing class, method, and property refactoring history.

2. Stepsize Issue Tracker

Stepsize is an issue tracker that lets engineers create better TODOs and code comments directly in the editor, helping reduce technical debt and support refactoring. It integrates with Jira, Asana, Linear, and GitHub.

Supported languages: All.

3. New Relic CodeStream

CodeStream is a developer collaboration platform for code discussion and review. It supports pull requests from GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab, integrates with Jira, Trello, Asana, and nine other issue trackers, and enables team discussions around code topics.

Create, review, and merge GitHub pull requests.

Get feedback on ongoing work through pre‑PR code reviews.

Discuss code topics with team members.

4. Comments Highlighter

This plugin lets you create custom highlights for comment lines and language keywords, defining user‑specific markers for comment highlighting.

Language support: Any language with comment highlighting, currently Java, Kotlin, PHP, C/C++/Objective‑C, and C#.

5. Better Comments

Better Comments helps developers create more human‑friendly annotations in code, categorizing comments into warnings, queries, todos, and highlights.

Language support: All.

6. SonarLint

SonarLint works like a spell‑checker for code, showing real‑time errors and security vulnerabilities while you code and providing clear remediation guidance before committing.

Supported languages: C, C++, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, Kotlin, Ruby, HTML, PHP.

7. IntelliJ SpotBugs

IntelliJ SpotBugs provides static bytecode analysis to find errors in Java code, detecting over 400 error patterns such as null‑pointer dereferences, infinite recursion, misuse of Java libraries, and deadlocks.

It can identify hundreds of severe defects in large applications, typically about one defect per 1,000‑2,000 lines of non‑comment source code.

Language support: Java.

8. Snyk Vulnerability Scanner

Snyk helps developers find and fix security vulnerabilities and code‑quality issues in projects.

Detect and remediate security problems.

View issues grouped by category.

Receive actionable fix recommendations.

Language support: All.

9. Zero Width Characters Locator

Inspired by a Stack Overflow question, this plugin adds a check to prevent hard‑to‑detect errors caused by invisible zero‑width characters in source code and resources. Enable the "zero‑width Unicode characters" inspection to use it.

Language support: All.

10. CodeMR

CodeMR is a software quality and static analysis tool that visualizes code metrics and high‑level quality attributes (coupling, complexity, cohesion, size) in various views such as package structure, tree maps, sunburst, dependency, and graph views.

Language support: Java, Kotlin, Scala.

With these ten extensions, your codebase will stay cleaner and more maintainable.