IntelliJ Platform Plugin SDK
 
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Status Bar Widgets

Edit pageLast modified: 07 August 2024

The IntelliJ Platform allows plugins to extend the IDE status bar with additional custom widgets.

Status bar widgets are small UI elements that allow providing users with useful information and settings for the current file, project, IDE, and similar. For example, the status bar contains the widget showing the encoding of the current file, or the current VCS branch of the project.

Due to the prominent presentation and limited space, they should be used only for information or settings that are relevant enough to be "always" shown.

The starting point for extending the status bar with new widgets is the StatusBarWidgetFactory interface, which is registered in the com.intellij.statusBarWidgetFactory extension point. Note: id attribute must be provided in plugin.xml registration and match value from StatusBarWidgetFactory.getId().

In case a widget provides information or functionality related to the editor files, consider extending the StatusBarEditorBasedWidgetFactory class.

Each widget factory returns a new widget from createWidget(). To control the disposing of a widget, implement the disposeWidget(). To dispose it, use Disposer.dispose(widget).

Any widget must implement the StatusBarWidget interface.

To reuse the IntelliJ Platform implementation, you can extend one of two classes: