Writing Scala code with Intellij has become quite annoying. Intellij is definitely the tool of choice for Java coding. With all that “enterprisey” brew-ha going on you need all the help you can get.

Lately, Intellij has started to get bloated. And unreliable. It’s always indexing things at the most inconvenient times. This is specially the case when you open a project and hope to start working. It also has quite a few bugs and crashes frequently. It’s also in competition with sbt for its lock file. Forget about running sbt and Intellij at the same time.

I’ve started playing around with using Sublime Text as a Scala IDE. Initially I did not know how to start work. I had become so dependent on Intellij to tell me everything about anything that I had no clue how to proceed. I couldn’t CTRL + Click. I couldn’t CMD + SPACE. I was powerless.

After persisting for a few hours and after installing a bunch of useful plugins I was getting somewhere.

I found that it was much easier to focus on the code. Intellij was not constantly prompting me for stuff, or indexing or crashing or doing something else distracting. I ended up writing simpler code as I had to use less tooling. The whole experience was much more enjoyable.

In a subsequent article I’ll get into the details on how I customised my Sublime environment to make it useful for Scala development. If in the meantime you are considering leaving Intellij for Sublime, Vim, Atom or some other editor, definitely go for it. You will not regret it.