Spacemacs for the Scala developer

Over the last few days I’ve been evaluating Spacemacs as a replacement for Vim: I had already come to appreciate it because of its pleasant user experience and configurability but I was still missing a killer feature… Today I set out to explore Spacemacs’ scala configuration layer and guess what? I think I found one! By integrating with ensime, Spacemacs gains IDE-level features such as: infer variable type, organize imports, extract method, rename variable, jump to definition, and many more… That’s incredibly better than my previous setup (vim + sbt running on the side)! Setting up a project for Ensime integration is straightforward:

add ensime-sbt to your (global or local) plugins.sbt,
run sbt gen-ensime to generate the .ensime file,
start ensime server (SPC m n s).

Here are a few functions I find very useful:

Keybinding	Function
`SPC m g g`	go to definition
`SPC m i i`	inspect type at point
`SPC m r f`	format code
`SPC m r i`	organize imports
`SPC m r r`	rename a symbol project wide
`SPC m s b`	send buffer to REPL
`SPC m s r`	send region of code to REPL
`SPC m t r`	run quick tests

Furthermore, while navigating a Scala file the current line’s method definition (or expression return type) will appear in the status bar.

For a complete list of features and keybindings, visit the official website.