What's the best ide/editor for elixir in 2021?

Mandatory clarification: there is no “best” tool in almost any area. You pick what you like for the functionality that you require and are willing to give up other functionality you don’t deem important.

I personally can’t stand Visual Studio Code but many people like it, plus the active plugin system allows the community to improve the IDE constantly. So it’s very likely a safe bet for you.

I went for Emacs with a language server and a few addons for project management, searching inside files etc. I don’t care about auto-generated typespecs and semi-automated refactoring so I don’t miss VS Code.

We also have people here who use VIM + addons for Elixir development.

+1 here on the “go with w/e rocks your boat”

I use vim for the most part of the time. I just like my workflow paired with tmux.
The only thing that I don’t really do on this env is when I know I’ll spend a good amount of time on HTML files. When that’s the case, I generally reach for VScode.

Just use whatever you are already familiar with. The language works for you, not the other way around.

I use emacs without any language server or projectile or company, in a terminal not under tmux. I’ve tried fancy stuff, but always find myself back in this setup that has last me over 20 years and over 20 languages.

I discovered Spacemacs ~17 months ago and I can’t live without it now. It helps me a lot navigating big projects and just fuzzy-searching stuff all the time which for my brain at least works perfectly.

But I’ll agree that pure Emacs is faster.

Neovim and Tmux are the best.

• runs on any terminal
• ssh friendly
• elixir_lsp
• active plugin community
• mega-scriptable, always improving

So you found out you like Evil?

Luck for me, I don’t have to navigate very large, unfamiliar projects. Years ago at work I had to work in a crazily big Java project that demand Eclipse, and that’s a nightmare that haunt me to this day.

I’m still on TextMate. Tried to switch to VSCode and other editors multiple times, but always went back.

There really isn’t a right/wrong answer when it comes to Elixir.

Pretty much every editor will give you some access to important parts of the ecosystem which aren’t necessary to make it work.

I watch people be productive in Sublime, Emacs, Vim, VSCode, Atom, and Intellij (okay so Intellij is only one person but still). There isn’t a silver bullet because for the most part communities are working to build tools that are more agnostic now than there ever have been.

If you have an editor you’re familiar with, go with it, if you’re looking to try something different? Try something different. I went from Eclipse to Sublime to Atom to Emacs over the past 15 years and honestly we’re probably at the best point we’ve ever been.

I’ve recently started to use VSCode with Elixir again. While I still use IntelliJ IDEA for every other language, the tooling available for VSCode (and my inability to make the tooling work properly on IDEA) is just too great of an offer to miss.

Things like incremental Dialyzer analysis, automatic suggestion for @spec annotations, and various other quality-of-life features make VSCode the ultimate Elixir experience for me Perhaps other editors/IDEs can be configured to do everything the vscode-elixir-ls plugin does, but I haven’t managed (or put in the effort) to do that.

I switched 2 years ago from the Jetbrains suite to VSCode since the ElixirLS and other extensions worked best in VSCode. In the beginning, developing in VSCode felt sluggish since e.g. the Language Server wasn’t that snappy/fast and jumping to project and library definitions was slow or didn’t work at all. However, especially since version 0.6 of ElixirLS, that has improved tremendously and finally VSCode does not feel like it’s “holding me back” anymore. So, given the ecosystem, the free price tag, and the significantly improved Elixir extensions, VSCode is a clear recommendation for me.