Pieces for JetBrains 5.0.0: Explore Materials with Pieces Insights 🔎

The insanely useful Explore Materials with Pieces Insights feature just landed in Pieces for JetBrains! Understand new codebases more quickly, easily document your code, or collaborate with large teams by writing clear, helpful comments in seconds. We’re thrilled to introduce this brand-new functionality and we can’t wait for what’s next.

Explore with Pieces Insights

Exploring Materials with Pieces Insights allows you to learn more about a code snippet without necessarily saving it to your repository.

To Explore a material:

1. Highlight a code snippet in your editor
2. Right-click and select “Explore with Pieces Insights”
3. Click on the “View Insights” message in the lower right corner of your IDE
4. Pieces will open a new window with a markdown file that showcases your snippet, its description, and other associated metadata.

To revisit explored materials, check out the new section titled “Pieces Insights” in the lower right side bar of your JetBrains IDE (you can drag it to another location if you prefer). Here, you can view your explored materials, save them to Pieces, or delete them— just right-click.

Pieces Insights Settings

With a feature this huge, we like to make sure that you can customize it as much as possible. Explore Materials with Pieces Insights includes several settings, accessible in the plugin settings menu.

Insert description result from Explore Material Insights as a comment above the snippet.

If this setting is enabled, the automatically generated description will be placed as a comment above the material that you just explored. This is enabled by default.

Automatically save explored snippets and material insights.

This option is automatically off; turning it on will save your Explored Snippets and their insights— plus all of the other automatically generated context— to your Pieces repository.

Automatically delete explored material when manually saving to Pieces.

The materials that you explore are not necessarily auto-saved to Pieces, but they are saved in the Pieces Insights panel. If you choose to manually save one of those explored materials to Pieces, enabling this setting will automatically remove that snippet from the Pieces Insights Panel. If this is not enabled, the explored material will exist in both the Pieces Insights Panel and your Pieces repository.

Domain-Specific Insights Settings

There’s one more customization option available: Domain-specific insights. You can choose to make your Pieces Insights available across JetBrains IDEs or keep them confined to the IDE you’re using when you explore a material. Head to the Pieces for JetBrains Settings to make your decision!

Join our Beta Testing Program

Do you want to try the newest features of Pieces before they’re released? Do you want to make a difference in Pieces’ development? Sign up for our Beta Testing Program!

Support

As always, if you run into issues or have feedback, please fill out this quick form or email us at support@pieces.app and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible!