The default behavior of IntelliJ IDEA is to replace multiple class imports from a package with a star/wildcard/asterisk. So for example when you’ve got:

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Optional;

…and you try to import another class from java.util, everything is merged into one mass import: java.util.*.

At my team, we decided to turn that behavior off. Why and how?

  1. It is bad for version control.* Suppose one developer is using Eclipse and just adding another line to the imports. Then another developer is editing the same file and merging all the imports. We’ve got a merge conflict here! Also, with star imports, it’s harder to track what has been added to the local file namespace.
  2. It can lead to unnecessary naming collisions. There can be a lot of User classes in different packages. By importing everything from a package we can accidentally import something we do not want. Also, when a dependent package is upgraded, it might pollute our namespace with new imports that we’re not even aware of.

IntelliJ does not have a way to turn off star imports, but it has a threshold option. So everyone in the team set a ridiculously high threshold (like 500):

Here you can prevent IntelliJ from merging your imports

Another problem is folding imports by default. I believe that the imports section is actually a very important piece of code and it should not be folded. We need to be aware of what’s going on there, so we jumped into Settings > Editor > General > Code Folding and turned Imports off.

Further reading

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/creating-and-optimizing-imports.html#disable-wildcard-imports