Download This

A plugin for IDEs to download files.

Main features

• Three new actions:
  • Download Any Link opens a dialog where you can input some links to download.
  • Download This Link is available when the caret is placed to a link in an editor.
  • Download Selected Link is available when some text in an editor is selected.
• Supported types of links:
  • HTTP/HTTPS.
  • BitTorrent (requires specifying a path to a local torrent file).

Motivation

• Switching to a browser or to a torrent client is slower. IDE should support everything, for example, Git is supported inside IDE.
• Installation of separate applications is slower than installation of the plugin. By separate applications we mean a Torrent Client, but in the future we want to support the syntax of wget and curl commands that can be missing in Windows, for example.
• If you are using an IDE via remote access which supports only a single application (such as Projector), the plugin seems to be the single visual way to download files from the Internet to the host.

Installation

Just download a release and then choose this Zip file in Plugins | Install plugin from disk.

Running from source

./gradlew :plugin:runIde

This will open a sandbox-IDE with this plugin installed.

Building from source

./gradlew :plugin:buildPlugin

The plugin distribution file will appear in plugin/build/distributions dir.

Many things yet to improve

• Introduce features:
  • Show Download This Link and Download Selected Link as context actions.
  • An editor with the list of active and finished downloads.
  • Plugin settings (at least for default download dir).
  • Support more ways of torrent downloading:
    • By magnet links.
    • By info hashes.
  • Support parsing of curl and wget commands.
  • Show download initial status and progress.
  • Allow stopping downloading.
  • Run reload from disk automatically after downloads.
• Fix issues:
  • Sometimes when minimizing and maximizing the IDE, the plugin disappears (no idea why).
  • Plugin isn't dynamic (Plugin DevKit | Plugin descriptor | Plugin.xml dynamic plugin verification doesn't find any errors, but the IDE asks to restart after deactivation and activation of the plugin).
  • Messages are "hardcoded" (maybe we can use the bundle concept, but can't find any guides how to use it).
• Don't use blocking calls (for example, switch to coroutines).
• Add plugin tests.
• Since not only links supported, remove Link word from names of actions.

Similar plugins

Download Selection provides only an action to download selected link, crashes when a bad link is selected, lacks open-source code, and supports only HTTP.