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When an IDE says it's indexing what does that mean? What is actually going on "under the hood"? Is it safe for me to build my project during it indexing or should I wait until it's finished indexing?
I'm assuming indexing is a common thing for IDEs but I've never had an explanation of indexing. I simply see the word indexing and think "I know that word, must be doing something." and I just take it for granted and expect it to happen.
What is indexing?
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IntelliJ IDEA can connect to the dedicated resource to download shared indexes for your JDK and Maven libraries and build shared indexes for your project's code. Whenever IntelliJ IDEA needs to reindex your application, it will use the available shared indexes and will build local indexes for the rest of the project.
Indexing proceeds at four stages namely content specification, tokenization of documents, processing of document terms, and index building. The index can be stored in the form of different data structures namely direct index, document index, lexicon and inverted index.
Sometimes when I start the IDE it will start 'Updating indexes' which takes a long time (about 15 minutes).
Different IDEs do different things, but typically it means that the IDE is processing up files so that it can offer Code Completion features (the box that gives you options when you type a partial line of code). Without indexing, the IDE would have to search through your files for the options to display as you are typing, which would be very slow.
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