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Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

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Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#91

Post by isityettime »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #86
akshaydeshraj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away ! Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.

> IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away ! I switched to IntelliJ back when people where still arguing which of the two between Eclipse or NetBeans was better (fools!): that is, before some of the commenters here were born. Heck, I bought IntelliJ when the world was ending in the Mayan calendar, it was something like 75% off beca…

Same, from beginning to end!

This week I had an LLM help me debug and resolve a subtle issue with Magit via TRAMP on macOS targets, and resolve it, plus a bunch of other small enhancements and fixes to my config. If your LLM agents have access to your Emacs config and installed packages, they can be really helpful in co-exploring your setup, explaining the behavior of built-ins as well as third-party plugins, and drafting new configuration.

Development is active, there are still great Emacs teachers creating books, blog posts, and videos, LLMs are genuinely good with Emacs, and the LSP ecosystem for Emacs is increasingly mature and well-integrated. There's never been a better time to jump in with Emacs, seriously.

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#92

Post by isityettime »

rob74 wrote: post #50
sajithdilshan wrote: post #13

> But what do you actually get with IntelliJ? A massive, monolithic Java application that frequently hogs 8GB+ of RAM, locks up your system while “indexing pre-built binaries,” and forces you into a closed proprietary ecosystem. This is just exaggeration. I use IntelliJIDEA everyday (on mac) with multiple projects open and tbh they have optimized the IDE a lot to make it faster. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's…

Completely agree. Also: some people enjoy fiddling with their tools, installing extensions and configuring everything until it's just perfect. Other people (most, I would argue - the proverbial "silent majority") want to get something that works reliably "out of the box" and has most (not all, IntelliJ IDEs also have plugins of course) batteries included. They shockingly are even willing to pay money for this!

The dream is something batteries-included but still radically hackable. Emacs is slowly making this feasible via smaller and smaller "starter kits" as it adds new features. It's not perfect, and maybe this approach will never yield a fully productized solution like IntelliJ. But getting a full-featured Emacs setup hasn't meant building the world from scratch in a long time!

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#93

Post by selivanovp »

terminalbraid wrote: post #53
laszlojamf wrote: post #49

I agree that IntelliJ is a monster of a resource hog, but I have yet to find an editor where code navigation is as good. That's basically all I use it for these days, in the days of LLMs, and I still think it's worth it. VSCode, especially for golang, is terrible. I might be holding it wrong, but I've really tried, and it's just not good enough. Before LLMs, when I still refactored by hand, coworkers who were using v…

This is my experience and it really sucks that Jetbrains has devolved into such a poorly run company. It's clear a lot of their real talent who cared about the programming side and refactoring left years ago. Now it seems like all their product decisions are from bog standard non-technical business people who chase buzzwords. This is a major problem for them because they fragmented their IDE codebase so much properly…

Significant portion of their staff left in 2022, when they decided to relocate from Russia and they keep bleeding engineers ever since. Despite registration in Prague, JetBrains has always been a Russian company with dominantly Russian employees.

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#94

Post by marginalia_nu »

mechanicum wrote: post #89
marginalia_nu wrote: post #4

The fact we still don't have a decent Java language server is one of my canaries for the fact that LLMs still, generally speaking, can't ship. There is undeniably demand for this sort of thing, but nobody is coming to meet it. (jdtls, bless it for trying, is just not good)

My understanding was the biggest issue has always been that javac is a poor foundation for any kind of live tooling like LSPs? It’s less “make me a Java LSP” than “rewrite javac around incremental compilation and exposing a semantic DB”. Which sounds like a much harder problem.

We have a java compiler API nowadays that solves this.

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#95

Post by selivanovp »

denisw wrote: post #59
phplovesong wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well its a russian company, and took part in the solarwinds hack, that was directly funded by the fsb. So, yeah, it should ve scrutinized, nitpicked and avoided at all costs. Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.

JetBrains is and has always been a Czech (and, thus, EU) company, not a Russian one. Yes, the founders are Russian, but that does not make the company so. They did have Russian offices, but closed them after the start of the Ukraine war [1]. The only confirmed link to the SolarWinds attack seems to be that SolarWinds was using TeamCity (JetBrains' CI/CD product) and that this was alledgedly used as a "gateway" to Sol…

The company was registered in Prague for political and financial reasons, but it has always been Russian to the core. Yes, they had multiple offices outside of Russia, but they were still mostly populated by relocated Russians. That's why their product quality significantly dropped since 2022, as they've cut themselves from their main source of engineers.

You're right about SolarWinds though.

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#96

Post by KallDrexx »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #86
akshaydeshraj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away ! Almost 15 years later, nothing else matches the out of the box experience of IntelliJ, atleast for JVM based languages.

> IntelliJ (actually Android Studio based on IntelliJ) was my first real IDE and real programming experience. I was so blown away ! I switched to IntelliJ back when people where still arguing which of the two between Eclipse or NetBeans was better (fools!): that is, before some of the commenters here were born. Heck, I bought IntelliJ when the world was ending in the Mayan calendar, it was something like 75% off beca…

I am spending a lot of time trying to migrate from decades of JetBrains IDEs to Emacs.

It's not trivial though and it's a good thing I am willing to tinker and explore. I got a decent Neovim development setup going in a few days with the help of blog posts but Emacs is a whole different story, with a lot of legacy terminology and a lot of very sporadic resources. Doom suffered (for me) from a lot of complexity, assumed emacs knowledge, and confusion for how to customize. Emacs Kickstart was closer to a jumping off point but still had a lot of confusing things going for it.

I'm still making the leap because I see the potential to have a truly customizable IDE that's customized to me (and not throwing AI things at me every few weeks) but sheesh, it's not trivial.

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#97

Post by rs_rs_rs_rs_rs »

wiether wrote: post #44
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #35

IntelliJ Git integration is so good I wish it would be a standalone client.

Funnily that's the one feature I dislike in IntelliJ and thus relies on another GUI Otherwise I like having everything in one place: code, containers, databases, remotes...

What are you using instead?

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#98

Post by mechanicum »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #94
mechanicum wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was the biggest issue has always been that javac is a poor foundation for any kind of live tooling like LSPs? It’s less “make me a Java LSP” than “rewrite javac around incremental compilation and exposing a semantic DB”. Which sounds like a much harder problem.

We have a java compiler API nowadays that solves this.

It looks like that was added in Java SE 6, and doesn’t materially change the underlying problem. Have there been more recent developments?

Re: Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

#99

Post by krzyk »

phplovesong wrote: post #54
DrProtic wrote: post #45

People will go to great lengths to avoid paying for what is, arguably, an outstanding product from a great company, then think nothing of spending the same amount at Starbucks. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company scrutinized and nitpicked as much as JetBrains.

Well its a russian company, and took part in the solarwinds hack, that was directly funded by the fsb. So, yeah, it should ve scrutinized, nitpicked and avoided at all costs. Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.

> Its 2026, there is no need for a proprieraty IDE that is stuck in the early 2000s.

This is the best IDE for Java. And it is nowhere near 2000s, it is modern and the best one can use for Java.

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