A developer built an IntelliJ/Android Studio plugin called YACT (Yet Another Composition Tracer) to solve navigation pain points with CompositionLocal in Jetpack Compose. The plugin adds gutter icons for one-click navigation to providers, Code Vision lenses showing provider/assignment counts, color swatches for hex color literals, and a keyboard shortcut to jump directly to theme property assignments. Under the hood it uses IntelliJ's PSI tree, FileBasedIndex for fast background indexing, SmartPsiElementPointer for thread safety, and NotNullLazyValue for deferred computation. The post covers K1/K2 Kotlin compatibility, macOS shortcut conflicts, and the plugin publishing process via JetBrains Marketplace.
Table of contents
The Intro: The ProblemThe Solution: Don’t Change the Code, Change How You See ItWhat the Plugin Actually DoesUnder the Hood: IntelliJ SDKGet Andrew Malitchuk ’s stories in your inboxThe PitfallsShipping ItWhat’s NextConclusionSort: