I’ve installed, un-installed, re-installed, re-un-installed, re-re-installed and so on IntelliJ IDEA multiple times on my MacBook. However the uninstall leaves a few remnants in different directories all over the system. These directories need to be manually removed in order for a clean install next time. This TOTD (Tip Of The Day) provide the list of directories which need to be removed explicitly:

~/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea90
~/Library/Logs/IntelliJIdea90
~/Library/Preferences/IntelliJIdea90
~/Library/Application Support/IntelliJIdea90

And IntelliJ IDEA is installed in the directory “/Application/IntelliJIdea90” which gets deleted if the application is deleted. And you’ll need to get rid of this directory if the mystical plugin configuration is not configured right the first time.

Also read IDEA-43039 for more details on invalidating caches. Read more on stackoverflow.com on how to clear out global settings.

That’s it, just a short one this time!

Is there a better way to deal with this mess ?