I have been using the community editions of IntelliJ and PyCharm for a while now for Python or Perl projects. But it started to annoy me that for Debian packaging bits it would “revert” into a fancy version of notepad. Being fed up with it, I set down and spent the last week studying how to write a plugin to “fix” this.
After a few prototypes, I have now released IDEA-debpkg v0.0.3 (Link to JetBrain’s official plugin listing with screenshots). It provides a set of basic features for debian/control like syntax highlighting, various degree of content validation, folding of long fields, code completion and “CTRL + hover” documentation. For debian/changelog, it is mostly just syntax highlighting with a bit of fancy linking for now. I have not done anything for debian/rules as I noted there is a Makefile plugin, which will have to do for now.
The code is available from github and licensed under Apache-2.0. Contributors, issues/feature requests and pull requests are very welcome. Among things I could help with are:
- Icons – both for the plugin and for the file types. Currently it is just colored text, which is as far as my artistic skills got with the space provided.
- Color and text formatting for syntax highlighting.
- Reports of papercut or features that would be very useful to prioritize.
- Review of the “CTRL + hover” documentation. I am hoping for something that is help for new contributors but I am very unlikely to have gotten it right (among other because I wrote most of it to “get it done” rather than “getting it right”)
I hope you will take it for spin if you have been looking for a bit of Debian packaging support to your PyCharm or other IDEA IDE. 
Please do file bugs/issues if you run into issues, rough edges or unhelpful documentation, etc.