FAQ

• Is there a plan for the development? Yes. We have a Trello board where we collect ideas. There, you can vote for features or create your own. The issues in the bugtracker playing a role in what I'm working on.

• Can I deploy my package? Basically yes. Yes, because deploying a package is often not more than creating a .zip file from your package sources that users can extract into their Applications directory. You can easily create an Artifact in IDEA that does this within seconds. What we will work on is a way to incorporate PacletInfo.m files that are used in newer versions of Mathematica to distribute packages. With this, automatic deployment, versioning, and installation will be possible, but we need some more time to figure out the details.

• Can I run my code inside IDEA? No. What we will implement is a way to start your packages in Mathematica from within IDEA like the Wolfram Workbench does it. This is a long term plan and until then, you need to have a separate instance of Mathematica open, where you can test and run your package.

• Why can't I build documentation with your plugin? Because at the moment, there is no documented way how this is done at Wolfram. Even if we implemented it by digging around in the Wolfram Workbench internals, chances are high that it won't work in the next release as Wolfram changes this regularly. Hopes are that in the near future Wolfram will provide an official and stable way how this is done so that we can implement it for the Mathematica plugin as well.

• Can I debug my code? Unfortunately not. Like building the package documentation, there is no documentation available on how Wolfram Workbench does this. Most of the implementation details are hidden.

• Who are the developers? Unfortunately, it's currently only me, but I receive a lot of help from people like szhorvat, kubaPod, rsmenon and other people who discuss features or tag issues.

• How large is the code base? As of November 2016, the plugin contains about 13000 lines of Java code not counting comments and empty lines. One of the hardest parts was to implement a working parser for the language that is necessary to provide most of the fancy features. Besides this, creating good color schemes, designing icons, extracting symbol information and usage messages from Mathematica and understanding the IDEA API takes nearly as much time.