is it possible to have two project views in intellij idea

Question

I am working with a big project on my IDEA with many modules. I would like to compare files and directories in the project view. Scrolling each time just to select the files for comparison is tedious. I am not using scroll from source so what I wanted to have is two views of the project, each one is scrolled to different files.
Is there a way to achieve that? Or any other alternative?

Answer 1

The closest you can get is the favourites view where you can drop individual files into a list and then compare them without having to scroll around the project view. Unfortunately that is only any use if you are comparing the same sets of files each time.

Answer 2

Unfortunately there is no out of the box way to do that, IDEA can run multiple instances, each with a different project, but switching is kind of painful.

One workaround is to import multiple maven projects as a modules of one project as described in this question.

There is an issue for that feature in the JetBrains issue tracker, it is interesting to read the conversation history there. Currently it seems JetBrains do not plan to implement this feature anywhere in the future.

...it makes no sense in IDEA. Unlike other platform-based IDEs, IDEA supports multi-module projects, and all the contents displayed in a single frame are modules of a single project. Introducing an extra level of hierarchy above that would be unnecessary and extremely confusing. ... We don't have any plans to provide any other solution for this. The 1:1 correspondence between projects and frames is essential to the internal design of IntelliJ IDEA: by definition, a project is the set of code opened in a single frame. There is no way to change this without rewriting the whole IDE, which we don't plan to do.

Answer 3

There was such view in intelliJ called Commander. Since last versions it's not shipped together with intelliJ, but you can install it as a plugin.

I think it will be helpful for your case.