Great documentation should be there for you like a friend that always seems to be around whenever you need one. As documentarians, we take pride in the knowledge that we cultivate, but in order for that knowledge to reach its potential, folks need to find it when they need it.
While code comments do save lives, modern architecture is increasingly demanding that we couple higher-level types documentation with code, and this is generally way bigger than what most of us consider to be appropriate for a comment. This is where Swimm excels, and we couldn’t be more excited to announce that you can now find and read your Swimm documentation when and where you need it – right from any IntelliJ IDE! You don’t have to limit your team to what fits into a few lines of comments – your developers can now find everything that you’ve documented with Swimm, and read to whatever depth suits their need.
To try it, we recommend making sure that markdown export is enabled, and navigating to the “Integrations” tab in the app. There, you’ll find our supported IDE plugins:
You can also go directly to the marketplace to install it. If you don’t have markdown export enabled, the plugin will launch the Swimm app directly and navigate to the linked document. The most efficient experience, however, is with exporting enabled, which allows the IDE to simply open and render the markdown in a tab.
IDE Integration is a keystone in the larger Continuous Documentation scheme, as it provides immediate value to developers. The best highly-coupled through documentation in the world doesn’t help folks if they don’t know it exists or where to find it; making it available through the IDE itself “just in time” is the best possible way to support developers as they learn things in a way that works for them.
We hope you’ll give it a try, and let us know what you think! If you have any problems, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. If you find the plugin useful, please considering leaving an honest review!
Would you like to give Swimm a try? Sign up for a free Swimm demo
