Notification groups in IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1: Persisting suppression across restarts?

Question

Notification groups in IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1
The 2023.1 release introduced per‑category notification groups, allowing users to define whether a category appears as a balloon, in the status bar, or is suppressed entirely.
When a balloon includes a Suppress button, the IDE records a user preference that can be toggled in Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Notifications. However, the documentation does not specify whether this preference survives across IDE restarts or only applies to the current session.
Additionally, the global Mute all notifications toggle is documented to affect only the current instance, raising questions about its interaction with per‑category suppression rules when the IDE is reopened.
To clarify the persistence and interaction of these settings, the following questions remain:

Does clicking Suppress on a notification balloon permanently disable that category for future sessions, or is the suppression reset on restart?
When Mute all notifications is active, does it override per‑category suppression settings after a restart, or do the per‑category rules take precedence?
Is there a documented hierarchy between the Show as balloon and Show notifications in status bar options that could lead to duplicate alerts if both are enabled?

Tasadduq Burney · Answer

Answer
Clicking the Suppress button on a notification balloon writes the user’s choice to options/notifications.xml in the IDE configuration. This file is read at startup, so the suppression persists across IDE restarts.
Confirmed facts

Suppress setting is stored permanently and survives restarts.
The Mute all notifications toggle is a session‑only flag; it is not written to the configuration and is reset to off when the IDE restarts.

Likely explanation

The UI for each notification group presents Show as balloon and Show notifications in status bar as radio buttons, making them mutually exclusive. If both options were somehow present in the config (e.g., by manual edit), the balloon option takes precedence, preventing duplicate alerts.

Verification steps

Trigger a notification (e.g., via a plugin warning or intentional exception).
When the balloon appears, click Suppress.
Restart IntelliJ IDEA.
Trigger the same notification again; confirm no balloon appears for that category.
To test the mute toggle: enable Mute all notifications from the notification popup or Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Notifications.
Restart IDEA.
Open Settings → Appearance & Behavior → Notifications and verify the mute toggle is off.
Trigger a notification; it should appear according to its per‑category setting (balloon if not suppressed, status bar if configured).

Notification groups in IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1: Persisting suppression across restarts?

Notification groups in IntelliJ IDEA 2023.1

1 answer

Answer

Confirmed facts

Likely explanation

Verification steps

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