Amazon Q Developer Tips: No.2 IDE Layout

In the previous post I shared the importance of forming daily habits to help you discover your own flow when working with AI coding assistants like Amazon Q Developer. I also shared the first tip - make sure you keep your Amazon Q Developer plugin auto updated.

In this series I will be sharing daily hints and tips to help you get ahead and start to accelerate you on your own journey. Each day I will share something new tip, categorised against a few themes and topics. If you have your own tips, or your own experiences with tips I share, please use the comment feature or feel free to contact me directly.

Ok enough, lets get on with todays tip.

Tip 2 - Setting yourself up for success: Improving the Amazon Q Developer chat layout

This tip is focused for VSCode users. If you are using IntelliJ then you already have a great default layout out of the box!

When you first install the Amazon Q Developer plugin in VSCode, the Amazon Q Developer icon appears on the left hand with other VSCode plugins you might have installed. To access Amazon Q Developer, you just click on the Q icon, and voila. All good.

One of the issues that this default location presents is that you have to perform multiple clicks to change between your project/code view, and the Amazon Q Developer chat interface. Whilst this might not seem like too much of a hassle, once you are deep into using Amazon Q Developer on a regular basis, it can become a drag. Especially when you are trying to review the output of one of your prompts and you have to keep cycling between the two views.

There has to be a better way, right? And of course there is. You can simply take the Amazon Q Developer icon, and drag it over to the right hand side. Now you can see both your project files AND the Amazon Q Developer chat interface. Trust me, this is game changing and you will love this improved layout.

Here is a quick video of me showing you how to do this.

One thing you should be aware of is when you move Amazon Q to the right hand side of your VSCode, sometimes this pane might disappear (you might close it, or restart your VSCode). To get it back, you just need to click on the “Amazon Q” at the bottom of the VSCode status bar, and from the menu, select “Open Chat Panel”.

Check out this short clip to see this in action.

That’s it for this tip, but keep posted for a new tip that I will publish tomorrow. Until then, happy coding with Amazon Q!

Try Amazon Q Developer today, and claim your free Builder ID

You can try Amazon Q Developer for free today, by signing up for a Builder ID. You can also check out my other posts on community.aws, as I have been sharing a lot of tips and use cases of how I am using Amazon Q Developer. You can also keep up to date with all the new features and improvements of Amazon Q Developer by checking out the changelog.

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