Been putting off upgrading my IntelliJ IDEA 14 now for some time. But yesterday, I got annoyed with it by incorrectly importing a couple of multi-module Maven projects. Therefore I bit the bullet and installed 2016.1.
One of the reasons why I was so reluctant with the upgrade, was the fact that the newer versions of IntelliJ simply imported multi-module Maven projects as a flat structure rather than grouped by they top-level project. Working with a large number of multi-module projects (50+ individual modules), makes your project overview impossible to use. So I wasn’t too pleased that this bug still persisted. However, you could manually group the modules again in the Project structure dialog – though this is a bit painful thanks to the alphabetic sorting of modules.
Anyhow, that was just a minor nuisance. The bigger issue was that the new font rendering in 2016.1 is sub-par (washed out, fuzzy display). Turns out that they are now bundling a custom JRE based on OpenJDK with their application, which screws up the font rendering. At least they left it configurable, which means you can simply set the IDEA_JDK environment variable and point to an Oracle JDK.
Finally, I figured out how to save Run/Debug configurations when nuking workspaces. In each configuration, you find the Share checkbox in the top right corner of the dialog. This is actually meant to share these configurations in a team, i.e., have them under version control. However, you can simply backup the .idea/runConfigurations folder and then copy it back into the new workspace to have them automatically reappear. Quite neat! 🙂