Why can't I select a workspace by opening intellij?

[hj-lorenz]

As a developer, I am used to being able to select a workspace from a list when starting IntelliJ.
Why does ide always start with the workspace "main" instead of asking which workspace should be startet?

Current state:
Using the command "ide intellij" starts an eclipse of my current project always with the workspace "main"

Target state:
By starting intellij with "ide intellij" the tool intellij should ask which workspace should be startet - especially if there is more than one available.

[hohwille]

First of all the IDEasy workspace can already be selected by the current working directory. If I am not inside an other workspace, then the workspace defaults to main. Simply do icd -w test (cd $IDE_HOME/workspaces/test) if you have a test workspace and ide intellij will launch IntelliJ in that test workspace instead.
However, if your question is also about the default behaviour of IntelliJ if installed manually and used without IDEasy that asks for the folder to open and that can also be changed in IntelliJ via File > Open ... the answer is a little more complex:

IDEasy aims not only to install tools for your project but also to configure them. IntelliJ unfortunately made this very hard for us due to its design:

• Some of the configurations for IntelliJ are stored inside a .idea folder that is inside the top-level folder that is opened inside IntelliJ.
• Other configurations are stored inside the idea.config.path which by default is inside a directory specific to the IntelliJ version but also global for the user.

This is documented for IntelliJ here.

Both of that caused severe problems to tame IntelliJ:

• IDEasy only knows about workspaces but you can clone any folders with project specific names in there or anywhere else on your local disc and open them manually in IntelliJ. How could IDEasy know where you did this or maybe are going to do that in order to manage and modify configurations inside a .idea sub-folder?
• IDEasy supports to create and manage multiple software-development projects on the same computer. If two projects both may use the same IntelliJ version but require different configurations, how could this be solved? That is exactly the problem users have without IDEasy. Whenever you switch from one project to the other, you also need to change the configuration of IntelliJ.
• Further configurations are mainly stored in XML files but inside the same XML file many different aspects are mixed (and in some cases inside the XML some values are actually text that is another sub-configuration in JSON format). Therefore we had to implement a very complex XML merger in order to solve all the problems and being able to manage only dedicated aspects of the configuration without overriding other aspects that should stay in the control of the end-user (developer).

As a solution, we redirect all these configuration locations to the selected workspace in your project (by default $IDE_HOME/workspaces/main). Therefore you will find the two folders discussed above in your workspace as .idea and .intellij. This way we know where the configuration of IntelliJ is located and can manage it to automatically configure your tools, SDKs, compiler-settings, etc. to the needs of your project.

The disadvantage of this approach is that IDEasy users have to get used to the fact that they open the workspace as root folder in IntelliJ and have their code project(s) in there as sub-folder(s). Further, to activate your project with build tools, like Maven or Gradle, you need to do that manually on the initial setup (until we also have created an automatic project import for IntelliJ):