intellij-plugins VS Metals

For these demonstrations, I'm using IntelliJ IDEA, equipped with the Kotlin Notebook plugin and all necessary dependencies. If you’d like to follow along step-by-step, I recommend setting up your environment similarly. Here is a short installation guide.

Android Studio or IntellijIDEA (configured for Android development) installed and working in your machine.

If you are using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, you can set environment variables in the configuration settings of your application.

Being somewhat allergic to coding in Java (this is a personal thing, if you like Java then good for you) I decided to try out writing the code using Kotlin from JetBrains instead. I'm already using IntelliJ as I work with Apache Spark using Scala, so the tooling was already there and ready to go for this.

IntelliJ (look for the community edition) on the other hand offered great out-of-box Groovy support including IntelliSence, building, and running features. So, I sticked with it 😊

I readily admit I am not familiar enough with fossil to know about the impedance mismatch, but I'll point out that https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/tree/idea/241.... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/idea/24... may a long way toward finding how they think about those operations

jetbrains.com — Productivity tools, IDEs and deploy tools (aka IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, etc). Free license for students, teachers, Open Source and user groups.

I've always used IntelliJ IDEA, other IDEs start feeling useless once you go down the Jetbrains path 😅

I offer, again, my JetBrains GrammarKit counterpoint from the last time that assertion came up <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38192427>

>>>

I consider the JetBrains parsing system to be world class and they seem to hand-write very few (instead building on this system: https://github.com/JetBrains/Grammar-Kit#readme )

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... (the parser I'll concede, as they do seem to be hand-rolling that part)

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... (same for its parser)

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23... and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/23...

- https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/blob/idea/233.... and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-plugins/blob/idea/233....

Links: - https://dotty.epfl.ch/ - https://scala-native.org/en/stable/ - https://www.scala-js.org/ - https://typelevel.org/ - https://zio.dev/ - https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native/pull/3120 - https://github.com/lampepfl/dotty/pull/16517 - https://dotty.epfl.ch/docs/reference/experimental/index.html - https://scala-cli.virtuslab.org/ - https://scalameta.org/metals/ - https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/guides/migration/compatibility-intro.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2023/04/18/faster-scalajs-development-with-frontend-tooling.html - https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2022/08/17/long-term-compatibility-plans.html

You might want to look at Scala, they have proper LSP support with metals which means you can write your code in vscode, neovim, emacs, or even fleet (the new jetbrains text editor).

Please write in the comments if you know of any language servers I should test it with. Currently I tested only metals and rust-analyzer.

If you are using nvim-lspconfig you can pass the settings as a Lua table to the setup function. For example, here are may metals settings:

Bazel support in Metals. I didn't spend all that time figuring out and adjusting Emacs/Spacemacs and making my workflow (almost) mouse-free just to scrap my config and switch to IDEA's rodent infested ways.

There is one small issue involving code completion returning inappropriate completions in some cases; https://github.com/scalameta/metals/pull/4414 will fix it, once it's included in a release. Perhaps that's the PR you saw?

It is, by quite a bit.

While the "Scala IDE" project is dead for all practical purposes, IntelliJ IDEA's Scala plugin is actually pretty amazing. There's also a VisualStudio plugin that does pretty much the same and is advancing by leaps and bounds. There are also interconnecting projects that provide i.e. language server or build server that are reused by other projects. It's pretty modular. Metals (https://scalameta.org/metals/) is amazing.

In general the language has become a wee bit faster to build, there was good progress with build times during the 2.12/2.13 cycles.

With Scala3 the language got a bit simpler; concepts that were implemented explicitly using (hehe) implicits got their own keywords and a lot of the opinionated boilercode that cause a lot of debates is now generated during complication and hidden. A lot of "standardization" has occurred.

IntelliJ has its own BSP. The other one is Metals. You can use it with many IDEs (vim, emacs, vscode, atom,...). Use it with emacs if you're comfortable with it.