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by bad_user 4908 days ago
IntelliJ IDEA is awesome for working with Scala and it's free too - the Scala plugin works with the community edition.

Personally I got the "doomsday" offer which had a huge discount for IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate. And in my opinion, this IDE is worth every penny and I'm sad that I've stuck with Eclipse when I was working on Java projects.

2 comments

I got in on the same offer.

I found that it had feature parity with Eclipse for the most part, but there was enough missing that I went back to Eclipse. Time to donate!

What is missing?
The one thing I couldn't live without was pausing threads without a breakpoint. I found Eclipse background compilation to be faster and the compilation errors as you type to be better and more responsive.

I also use Eclipse for C/C++ but I run a separate instance for C/C++ so using IntelliJ wasn't an issue.

For my workflow IntelliJ didn't seem to add anything, but it did take away one or two small things.

For one thing, Intellij doesn't autoimport classes. I was trying out Play 2.0 and autocomplete didn't find a ton of classes for instance play.data.Form.

A minor thing, sure, and there are ways around it, but the Eclipse Scala IDE found all classes. I have gripes about Eclipse as well, but nothing is perfect.

IntelliJ does do autoimport. I have very occasionally seen IntelliJ not offer an import suggestion for a class I have used, but overall it's an extremely polished experience.
That's strange. I had no problem resolving that class on a default new Play 2.0 Scala app in IDEA 12. Unless I misunderstand your complaint... I have to hit Alt+Enter to select the Package+Class to Import since sometimes (usually) there are Class name conflicts. But it always resolves the dependencies properly.
What I mean is that play.data.Form wasn't in the initial autocomplete list; when I typed F-o-r it didn't suggest play.data.Form ( among others). Only after I had cancelled did it ask me for alt+enter to select one of the conflicting names.
enable "import on the fly" from settings.
why would you be stuck on eclipse when working on java?
Side note: Very likely, he's not. I think you're just being overly pedantic on verb tenses. Change "I've" to "I'd" if that makes it easier to read.

To be back on topic, I had a very similar experience after using Eclipse for several years. A co-worker introduced me to IntelliJ in 2005, and I have not regretted the decision since. IntelliJ is a fantastic IDE, particularly for Java.

Not pedantic, just misunderstood. Yep IJ is awesome. I tried eclipse again a couple years ago and there is no contest