Scala development in Vim

a) There is no intelligent auto-complete (not compared to an real IDE)

b) Background tasks of compiling/testing will block the UI. With scala especially, this is an issue.

c) No comparable refactoring capability.

I once had high hopes that eclim would be the answer, but I think it's just the wrong tool for the job. Let's not pretend vim can be something it was never designed for.

Neovim however might help to solve this problems, but when that will see the light of day, it seems to be hard to find out.

install boat-load of addons to try and replicate the IDEs they're decrying

The attraction is that vim is usually far more customizable and supports modeful editing (yes, there is IdeaVim, but it is quite a leaky abstraction). However, customizability comes with a price: it takes a while to set up.

The same holds for other applications. E.g. Mail.app is user-friendly, but there is little you can change in terms of shortcuts, behavior, etc. OTOH mutt takes a lot more time to set up, but you do nearly anything you want (including setting up GMail shortcuts and behavior).

3) still somehow recommend it even though it appears to be less efficient in the use case provided

That's why I also use IDEs. E.g. Go is really well-supported in vim, with completion, refactoring, etc. For Java, OTOH, vim cannot even come close to IntelliJ and others. So, I use an IDE.

I think vim-go has a really nice balance here. Part of the strength comes from the excellent tooling the Go community created. Each tool is orthogonal to each other and they are pluggable and reusable. So vim-go for example uses these tools to create wrappers around it and blend it like it's a part of Vim itself. It's not a IDE of course, however it feels like that.

I think the most important thing here is providing a orthogonal tools and well defined boundaries between them (which the Go tools have achieved already). Once that is established, more greater and better tools can be created upon on it.

I look for other language plugins from time to time and each time I see the same thing. The language which the plugin is build on itself doesn't have the sense of "orthogonality". So it makes it difficult to create plugin and support it. Once the underlying language and the community get the sense for it, the tool(in our case the Vim plugin and ecosystem) will improve itself too.

[1]: https://github.com/fatih/vim-go

For myself, I have taken to using less and less of what modern IDEs do. There is value in using a tool so that you don't have to internalize details of a project. However, the win from having internalized it is a very good feeling. To the point that when you find you are navigating abstractions, the answer is not a new or better abstraction, but to get rid of it. Will you have to understand more? Certainly. But this is not an unattainable goal.

The simpler the language, the easier it us to use it well without an IDE. I love Scala, but I'd never call it simple.

The only significant wart for me is the mismatch between SBT and IDEA projects. IDEA is stricter, there are valid SBT project structures that IDEA hates. Can crop up if you're working on other people's projects, started with Eclipse or a text editor. Other than that, IDEA is phenomenal for Scala development.