Elixir IDEs and developer tools

I use neovim + coc with elixir extension

For a non vim user, it’s rough at begining but you have everything you need

Same here (although I’m actually using Vim + alchemist vim).
I found out that I needed way less setup/plugins to get everything I needed compared to my Ruby/RoR setup.

@crova and @rodesousa, thank you for sharing! I was hoping to get one of the JetBrains IDEs or VS Code working here, but if vim happens to be the objectively better option here, then I’ll consider switching further down the line. Either way, it’s good to know that there is a good solution out there even if I’m not a fan of it

I’m pretty new to elixir as well, with a similar background as you (IntelliJ for most projects). I found that VSCode was (as you said) surprisingly nice. Refactoring is definitely a challenge, though I can’t say I have found it too much of an issue.

I work in a windows environment, though I prefer linux, and have found that WSL2 with alpine does everything I need. VSCode connects to it directly, and iex is much more pleasant (autocomplete works, pretty colors).

For me the biggest shift, coming from intellij and java and huge unwieldy codebases, is the simplicity. Building systems in Elixir (and they certainly feel and act like systems rather than plain old applications), somehow manages to organize complexity in a clean and manageable way. Having an IDE for Java is almost always necessary because there are often so many pieces flying around that it helps keep them all straight. With Elixir, it all just doesn’t seem so messy.

I hope this helps - your background definitely sounds a lot like mine, so I can understand the initial struggle to get comfortable with Elixir. But certainly it is worth every discomfort and mind-shift.

Great, thank you for sharing!

Your background does indeed seem similar to mine which means you’d probably understand how I ended up with a minor panic attack when I switched to a dynamic language with a fairly loose IDE I have to agree that I haven’t found this to be a problem yet, I was just thinking about what happens further down the line because I would like to develop some stuff with Phoenix. Given the nature of the language, I can understand how my concerns may be exaggerated, so I’ll proceed with VS Code for now.

In VSCode I use CTRL + SHIFT + H to replace something in all files of the project, and then there is this tiny symbol next to the filenames that applies the change, it appears as soon as you select a file.

Ah, it works, excellent! It looks like there are a bunch of plugins for this and VS Code internal capabilities some of which just don’t work while others only work with specific languages, but this command seems to have done the trick. Thanks for sharing! BTW, for anyone using a Mac it’s CMD+SHIFT+H

FYI - have had a lot of success with using the Elixir plugin for Rubymine. It’s a little awkward to set the SDK, but after that, it works well. Under Languages in Preferences, click the arrow to expand Elixir and show the SDK options for Elixir and Erlang. Click the + under each and you’ll have to set the path by navigating to the appropriate directory where you have installed each. In my case, using ASDF, it’s under ~/.asdf/installs/elixir/<your version here>. Do this for Elixir under SDKs and Erlang under Internal Erlang SDKs. After that, you should see this version of Elixir in the SDK selection for the language (i.e. with the drop-down collapsed).

I haven’t gotten to try Vscode yet. I see a lot of folks using it, but I also use RM for my day job, so it’s more about familiarity than anything for me. The debugger works well for Elixir too.

Personally, I use Doom Emacs with ElixirLS for development. But my general sense is that the majority of Elixir developers now use VSCode (and VSCode is significantly easier to get started with than Emacs). So VSCode is my general recommendation (with ElixirLS and not vscode-elixir since it is not maintained).

With Elixir, it is generally reasonable to use generic project-wide (and sometimes single-file) search and replace to refactor variable names. Or at least reasonable enough that no-one’s created tooling to do context-aware refactoring. But if someone were to implement refactoring in ElixirLS that would be much appreciated and could then be used across a large variety of editors.

Yeah, that’s what I tried originally, but that didn’t work. I get an error: “Cannot Save Settings: Please specify a different SDK name”. Based on quick research it means that the SDK is already set somewhere, but I’m not sure where. If I open an Elixir project, it warns me that there is no Elixir SDK and if I click on the corresponding button to “Set Elixir Module SDK” nothing happens.