Why "Show history" and "Show history for Selection" options are in grey using Git with Intellij Idea 13?

Question

Go to some code file in Idea 13. Right click on it. Why "Git->Show history" and "Git->Show history for Selection" options are in grey using Git with Intellij Idea 13?

Answer 1

From settings->Version Control edit the "Directory" entry in the table on the right pane and replace "project" with your project root path. You should now be able to show the history of files.

(This is of course a workaround, I'm not sure what IntelliJ considers to be the "project" directory)

Answer 2

I found I had two (git managed) projects. One had annotations etc. working. One did not - the annotations and "show history" menu items were greyed out.

What resolved the problem in the latter project was to

• Open the File -> Settings menu,
• Select the "Version Control" section (at the top level, not in the "Git" subsection)

Here the project was set to use the top level Git directory. This looked fine, and most of the other aspects of Git seemed to work through IntelliJ IDEA. However if I then:

• Edited the directory entry (selecting, and clicking the pencil icon), and
• Changed the radio selection from "Directory" to "Project", saving it

This allowed me then to access the git annotations menus etc.

The other project (which also worked with respect to annotations) had two entries, both a project entry, and a directory entry.

This was on Linux with:

IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1.3
Build #IC-145.1617, built on June 3, 2016
JRE: 1.8.0_76-release-b198 amd64
JVM: OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM by JetBrains s.r.o