[ssmoot]

> There's no obvious way to search within a directory.

On OSX at least: CMD+SHIFT+F brings up the Find dialog. Scope defaults to Whole Project (ALT+H) but you can change it to Directory (ALT+O) which seems to default to the directory of the currently selected file. (Or maybe Scope actually defaults to the last one you used.)

I'm wondering what version of IDEA you tried that wasn't this way?

I don't run into compiler issues too often, but I also don't use shapeless or scalaz so I wouldn't be surprised if more complex type signatures give IDEA trouble. I have noticed a drastic improvement with the Scala support since IDEA 13 or so.

[lmm]

This was 15. I didn't think to look for "find" because "search" is advertised on the default background screen and I expected it to use the same word - per the cousin comment it's working now.

Sadly the Scala support is still quite unreliable at least at the presentation level - lots of spurious red in the editor - maybe better than it was. I use both shapeless and scalaz extensively.

[jnem]

I use JetBrains Webstorm, and on that hitting CMD+SHFT+F creates a search local to the selected folder in the directory tree. Seems pretty intuitive to me, but finding files themselves, as opposed to string constants and the like, is actually the more difficult thing Ive yet to figure out.

[lmm]

Ctrl-Shift-N gets you an "open file" dialogue that does slightly fancy filtering/searching (e.g. you can put a substring of the name and it'll find it).