Having worked with Scala for the past almost two years, I can tell you this: you're missing out by not using IntelliJ. It is a huge timesaver, not just from the code completion or the inspections, but also by being able to fire up FSC outside of IntelliJ and have your code recompile very, very quickly when you make changes. The one thing that IntelliJ doesn't do very well yet is work with sbt. It works, sure, but the maven support in IntelliJ is that much further along, so I generally still use maven for in-IDE dependencies, and then write up an sbt file when I publish my work.