lich for IntelliJ IDEA

Hand your coding agent what you are looking at, without leaving the editor.

Send a selection, a file, a failed test, an error or a diff to a lich session — Claude Code, Codex, opencode or any agent lich runs — and keep an eye on your sessions from the status bar.

Nothing is sent for you

The text lands at the agent's prompt, after whatever you had already typed, and waits. You write the question around it and press Enter. A selection is context; what to ask about it is yours.

src/main/kotlin/App.kt:12-18
```kt
fun main() { ... }
```
why does this run twice on startup?█

What you can send

Gesture	Where	What lands at the prompt
Send Selection to lich	Editor right-click, or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+L	The selected code, headed by its file and lines
Send File to lich	Editor, editor tab or Project view right-click	The path of the file, or of every file selected
Send problem to lich	Alt+Enter on an error or warning, or right-click it in the Problems view	What the IDE says, over the lines it is about
Send Failure to lich	Right-click a failed test, class or suite in the test runner	Each failed test with its file, line, message and stack trace
Send Changes to lich	Right-click changed files in the Commit view	Their diff, for a review or a commit message
Add Comment to lich Review	Editor right-click, or the file's side of a diff	Nothing yet: the comment joins a batch, and Send to lich pastes them all as one list

Review comments wait in the lich Review tool window, which appears with the first one: reword one with a double-click or remove it, add a note about the change as a whole, and Send to lich pastes them as one prompt, the way lich's own review panel does —

Review comments:

- src/main/kotlin/App.kt:12-18 — leaks the listener
- src/main/kotlin/Boot.kt:4 — rename to start
- these are the same bug

They live in memory until they are sent: closing the project drops them.

Every session in a list wears its agent's mark — Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, opencode, oh-my-pi, Cursor — or a terminal for a shell.

Your sessions in the status bar

lich: 1 waiting · 2 working sits in the status bar, counting the sessions on your project. A balloon tells you when one finishes its turn or stops on a permission prompt. Hover for each session's agent, state and folder; click to list them, and pick one to open its card in lich.

Show in lich, on every balloon, brings the lich window forward with that session open.

 

Which session

The plugin picks the session running on the folder your IDE has open, and asks when that is not obvious:

1. A session running in that very folder is used without asking — a worktree opened in the IDE reaches the session in that worktree.
2. Otherwise a session of the project whose root the folder is.
3. A worktree with no session of its own, or a folder that only lies inside a project, is always asked about: pasting into a session working on another checkout is pasting somewhere wrong. A project at your home directory never counts as containing a folder.

When several fit, you pick one and it is remembered for the project. The list always ends with Open a new session here: lich opens one on your folder — opening the folder as a project first if it has to, and a worktree as a session in that worktree — and the text lands once the agent is up.

A session waiting on a permission prompt is greyed out: text pasted there would answer the dialog.

Install

1. Download lich-intellij-<version>.zip from the latest release.
2. Settings › Plugins › ⚙ › Install Plugin from Disk… and pick the zip.

The JetBrains Marketplace listing is on its way.

Requirements

IDE	IntelliJ IDEA 2024.3 (build 243) or newer
lich	0.65.0 or newer, running. 0.66.0 or newer for Show in lich to open the session; on 0.65 it brings the window forward

The plugin is built and tested on IntelliJ IDEA. It depends on the IntelliJ Platform alone, so PyCharm, WebStorm and the other JetBrains IDEs may run it, but nobody checks that they do — if you use one, fixes are welcome.

Settings

Settings › Tools › lich

Setting	Default
lich command	empty	Empty looks for lich on PATH, where lich installs it (Homebrew, /usr/local/bin, ~/.local/bin, Scoop) and through your login shell — an IDE started from a launcher does not get your terminal's PATH
Wrap a selection in a fenced code block	on
Name files with an @	off	@src/Main.kt, which Claude Code and several other agents read as a mention of the file
Always ask which session	off	Ask even when one session is the obvious one
New sessions run	claude	The agent Open a new session here starts

How it talks to lich

Only through the lich command, the part of lich covered by its stability promise and documented in its docs/cli.md:

lich sessions --json                                  # who is running, where, and doing what
lich insert --session <id> --json --timeout 10 -      # the text arrives on stdin
lich open --project <dir> [--worktree <branch>] --kind <agent> --json
lich focus --json <id>                                # Show in lich

The text goes on stdin, never in an argument: no quoting, no argument-length limit, no Windows command line to get wrong. lich has no supported way to push a change, so the status bar asks lich sessions every 5 seconds.

Known limits

• On Windows the terminal drops the markers that tell an agent a paste is one paste, so a multi-line selection can reach some agents line by line (lich's own docs/ceilings.md, under lich insert).
• Over 64 KiB lich refuses the text; send the file instead.
• A project reached through a path lich does not know as the project (another mount, WSL from a Windows IDE) has no session beside it; the plugin offers every session.

The plugin's own deliberate limits, and the traps they set, are in docs/ceilings.md.

Build from source

mise install                          # Java 21 and Gradle, as mise.toml pins them
./gradlew :core:test                  # the logic, on a plain JDK — no IDE download
./gradlew test buildPlugin            # everything; the zip lands in build/distributions/
./gradlew runIde                      # a sandbox IntelliJ IDEA with the plugin loaded

core/ decides what is sent where — snippets, session matching, finding and running lich — with no IntelliJ dependency; src/ gathers what the IDE shows and draws the result. Contributors, human or agent, start at CLAUDE.md.

License

AGPL-3.0, like lich.