IVR
Hi all, I’m new here and I’d like to apologise if this question isn’t exactly original, however, I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to my questions, so I’m posting this here anyway.
I’m getting started with Elixir and I haven’t quite figured out what IDE to use with it. I’d like to understand what tools are other Elixir developers using and I’d also like to highlight problems that I ran into while setting up my development environment. We might not be able to resolve all of them, but perhaps we might be able to resolve at least one.
I come from an IntelliJ background and here is the summary of what I’ve tried and where I’ve experienced problems:
- IntelliJ with the Elixir plugin: as I mentioned above, IntelliJ would be my preferred IDE, however even after installing the Elixir plugin and setting both Elixir and Erlang SDKs, IntelliJ isn’t complaining about anything but auto-completion and definition lookups don’t seem to work. I’ve found a number of related issues, like this one, but haven’t been able to resolve this problem.
- RubyMine with the Elixir plugin: I thought this should be very similar to IntelliJ, but I ran into a different problem when using RubyMine, I got an error “Elixir Module SDK is not defined” and even though there is a button next to it that says “Setup Elixir Module SDK”, nothing happens when I click it. If I go into Preferences → Languages & Frameworks → Elixir → SDKs and if I try to set an Elixir SDK, I get an error “Cannot save settings: please specify a different SDK name”. At least here I had an error to work with, but after about 20 minutes I’ve given up and decided to try option 3 (below)
- VS Code with the Elixir extension: This option works the best and I’m actually beginning to like VS Code. My biggest and so far the only problem is refactoring. In IntelliJ (or related tools) it’s as easy as Ctrl+T and all uses and definitions of the thing you are trying to refactor are updated, whereas in VS Code this seems like a major hassle. I’ve found ways to change a definition within a file but not throughout the project. If anyone has any suggestions here, then please let me know
Thank you all in advance for reading!
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eddy147
Next to VSCode I also have AstroVim setup (neovim + astro), easy to setup and works also great, but nothing to my liking is better than VSCode at the moment.
So if vim is not your thing, currently there are not really better alternatives to my liking.
odix67
it didn’t have to be, just make small steps, it will you pay back later, a good guide for starting is to use the vi plugin in VS Code or the IntelliJ products or/and follow the guide from thePrimeagen https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm323Lc7iSW_wuxqmKx_xxNtJC_hJbQ7R
and by the way, you are afraid setting up neovim with a set of plugins, try https://www.lazyvim.org
stevensonmt
I mostly use vim but I’ve played around with Lapce and found it to work pretty well out of the box.
travisf
I used Zed for the last six months or so. Out of the box support for Elixir, go to function worked, inline compile warnings, and function docs.
The only thing I really missed with Zed was the plugin ecosystem and inline git blames.
hochata
I currently use Emacs. The latest (beta) release comes with out of the box support for
elixir-ls. And even in the current stable release it is very easy to setup.Although if you don’t like Vim I guess Emacs wouldn’t be your pick either
quatermain
ohh, VIM and neovim is out of my skills. I’m really not good in vim style
odix67
sure, as elixirLS is an LSP implementation for elixir, I used it previously in VS Code, now with neovim, same behaviour, same functionality (regarding to elixir)
quatermain
so any experience with Elixir with those?
odix67
I think every editor which supports LSP is a good fit
quatermain
I’m updating this thread to ask if there are any updates about another IDE than VS Code which works good with elixir. I don’t mean code syntax only, but also some higher function like “go to function”, highlighting compile/dialyzer/credo warnings or something like that.