Mastering IntelliJ IDEA TODO: Customize, Filter, and Boost Your Code Management

Preface

Sometimes you need to mark sections of code for future reference—optimizations, improvements, potential changes, discussion points, etc. Typically we add a TODO comment like: //TODO I will do xxx here When everyone does this, projects can accumulate many TODO tags, making searches cumbersome and defeating their purpose.

IntelliJ IDEA lets you add special comment types that are highlighted, indexed, and listed in the TODO tool window, making it easier to track your TODO s.

Default TODO

By default IntelliJ IDEA recognizes two patterns: lowercase TODO and uppercase FIXME. These can be used in line or block comments of any supported file type. You can modify the default patterns or add your own.

As shown, you can create multi‑line TODO s (similar to multiple values in a Spring Boot YAML) by indenting subsequent comment lines. Without indentation, the line is treated as a regular comment.

To disable multi‑line TODO s, press ⌘+, to open Preferences, search for TODO (Editor | TODO), and you’ll see the configuration screen.

To view all TODO s, open the TODO tool window (shortcut ⌘+6) and switch scopes:

All files in the current project

Only the current file

A custom file set

The active changelist

Custom TODO

Reopen the TODO settings, add a new item such as optimize to label optimization tasks.

Add a filter to group TODO s.

Now you can quickly locate your custom TODO entries.

If your TODOs have a relatively fixed description, you can combine a Live Template to generate the content quickly.

High‑resolution images are available in the original article.

Summary

When a team is large and many TODOs exist, the TODO feature helps you tag items, and custom TODO s let you locate them quickly; you can fully leverage this feature, but remember to clean them regularly.

Regularly clean up TODOs

Soul Question

What code quality or cleanliness issues do you notice in your project? (Feel free to discuss in the comments below.)