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I only found how to delete projects in older versions of IDEA but still don't see the button in my IDEA 14. Did the Jetbrains guys implement this feature or do I still have to delete my project folders manually in file explorer?

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  • what happens when you press the delete key, whilst your project is highlighted ? Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 9:56
  • a popup asks me: "Remove Module 'Module Name' from the project? No files will be deleted" with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 10:44
  • 4
    well there ya go, if you want to delete files from your file system, you'll have to delete files "manually" Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 10:48
  • 1
    But this feature has been proposed even in the time of version 12. Stil not implemented? Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 11:38
  • I would be surprised if this was a very popular feature request. Most people like the current behaviour Commented Apr 8, 2015 at 11:52

6 Answers 6

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80

1. Choose project, right click, in context menu, choose Show in Explorer (on Mac, select Reveal in Finder).

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2. Choose menu File \ Close Project

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3. In Windows Explorer, press Del or Shift+Del for permanent delete.

4. At IntelliJ IDEA startup windows, hover cursor on old project name (what has been deleted) press Del for delelte.

enter image description here

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6 Comments

doesn't work on a mac, if anyone can add another answer
It in fact does work on OS X*, the option is called "Reveal in Finder". * At least with recent IntelliJ versions, I haven't tested old releases.
Thx man, I'd never guess pressing the 'del' button... It's like: "what the ...???" --- "Explicit is better than implicit"
So you can't rename a project (check here and here if you don't believe me) in a designed way and you can't delete a project in a designed way. I find it flabbergasting. Only workarounds/dirty hacks. Are you sure that just removing the deleted project from the recent projects list erases all its traces from the metafiles in the IntelliJ user configuration folder? I doubt it...
On Linux, the "Show in Files" option (equivalent to "Show in Explorer" in Windows) will open the location of the source folder in Files. If you want to delete all of the source files, then you can delete that folder. If you want to delete only the IntelliJ project specific files, then you can just delete the .idea folder.
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Deleting and Recreating a project with same name is tricky. If you try to follow above suggested steps and try to create a project with same name as the one you just deleted, you will run into error like

'C:/xxxxxx/pom.xml' already exists in VFS

Here is what I found would work.

  1. Remove module
  2. File -> Invalidate Cache (at this point the Intelli IDEA wants to restart)
  3. Close project
  4. Delete the folder form system explorer.
  5. Now you can create a project with same name as before.
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I followed this to remove the module.
1

You will have to manually delete from the project explorer (your local machine hard drive), then delete the project in IntelliJ when it asks to re-open recent projects.

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1

I am doing it manually in Intellij IDEA v2021.3.1, Ubuntu 20.04.

Steps:

  1. Select Project
  2. File > Close Project
  3. Right-click on project > Remove from Recent Projects enter image description here
  1. cd ~/IdeaProjects
  2. rm -fr ProjectDir
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I removed any .iml file as well as the whole subdirectory .idea but when I reopened intellij in the project directory it complained that there is this module already. Only after I went through the procedure above (except for the `rm -rf), I could re-open and re-configure the project.
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In my strange case, Intellij remembers forever about my project even if I delete .iml... Thus I did the following:

  1. Close project. Delete the .iml file.
  2. Rename my project directory (say my_proj) to my_proj_backup.
  3. (Possibly not needed) Open my_proj_backup in Intellij and close.
  4. Create an empty directory called my_proj, and open it in Intellij. Then close it.
  5. Remove the my_proj and move my_proj_backup back to my_proj. Then open my_proj in Intellij.

Then it happily forgot the old my_proj :)

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0

deleting the .idea folder underneath the project folder was the key.

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