IntelliJ left editor section

Question

Is there any way to decrease the left side with numbers of IntelliJ IDE? It's way too big for me and takes away precious space of the screen. Wasn't able to find any settings for that. Also no hints from google.

Answer 1

As already mentioned in the comments, you can't drag-drop or change a value easily so that the gutter is reduced in width. However, there are (as far as I can see) 3 things you can do to reduce (and actually almost eliminate) that whole section.

Starting with the least drastic one:

1. Remove the gutter icons.

Go to File > Settings > Editor > General > Gutter Icons and at the top you can completely disable them. That will significantly reduce the gutter size and won't be a (huge) pain for coding since these icons are just "nice to have".

Now the gutter will look like this:

2. A little bit more drastic is to remove the code-folding outlines.

Go to File > Settings > Editor > General > Code Folding and at the top remove the tick for code folding.

A very slight change, but at least something nonetheless:

3. Lastly, the most drastic (to me at least) action is to remove the line numbers.

I don't think that any programmer enjoys not knowing on which line they are on, but it will remove the gutter almost completely

Go to the Appearance section and un-tick Show line numbers. And the result will be:

In this case, at least the line number and character position are given at the bottom right, if that is even worth something...