The (wonderful) IntelliJ plugin for elm is no longer maintained, and recent breaking changes to IntelliJ have made using the plugin less attractive.
I’m interested in whether the elm community and core contributors have any official position on the support of key tooling like IDEs / editors. I notice the guide mentions Sublime, but this feels like it might be an out-of-date recommendation now?
When a high-quality tool like klazuka’s IntelliJ plugin exists, it tends to cast a shadow that prevents the creation of alternatives. The author has mentioned they are open to the project being forked and maintained elsewhere, which might let us benefit from the significant amount of work that has already been done on IntelliJ support.
I wonder if there are already elm community structures that exist to adopt and support this kind of ecosystem-level tooling? Resources for organisation, administration and of course funding, are helpful to make sure a language flourishes! The Haskell Foundation springs to mind as an example of how a language can leverage corporate interest to improve the wider experience. As a language, Elm is unparalleled in its accessibility! Tools like Ellie help make the on ramp easy for Elm, but progressing to writing real applications demands wider tooling support.
Relatedly, perhaps some of the large companies that use Elm already have resourcing in place for their own infrastructure, and would like to help contribute back to supporting tooling for the community?
As a last resort, perhaps there are existing Kotlin / IntelliJ plugin devs that would be happy to adopt the project. I’d consider this a last resort because it only moves the problem rather than solving it. klazuka has run out of energy for maintaining the plugin, and no doubt the same would happen to the next individual at some point.
Perhaps the answer is to switch to another officially supported editor, which is fine! However, what is it about that other tool that prevents the same thing happening there in the future? The VSCode plugin appears to also be mostly maintained by an individual. (thank you!)
I actually switched away from the VSCode extension a few years ago because the IntelliJ plugin was a better experience at the time. I’m interested to hear whether VSCode is now what people recommend for Elm?
I’ve also tried the emacs plugin, but unfortunately this takes advantage of lsp-mode, which is extremely challenging to use in environments where its keyboard bindings clash with the window manager.
Perhaps if there’s enough support for saving the IntelliJ plugin, this could be made possible! Otherwise I look forward to hearing your tips
It would be sad for this project to be abandoned. It was an instrumental tool in getting developers at my workplace onboarded with elm. Sadly my workplace has also moved away from elm otherwise I would absolutely be advocating for them to contribute/support this project.
Personally, I value the tool enough to pay for it, however a coordinated way to fund the project would be ideal. I wonder if klazuka would consider keeping the project afloat with some sort of funding support?
I’ve been using Neovim with the Elm language server tool to get me through, but there is no doubt the intellij plugin is a nicer experience.
I’m a longtime user of the IntelliJ plugin and big fan. It is a shame. Even if we abandon the current plug-in, I wonder about efforts towards some common plug-in infrastructure and how much can be done there
+1, I’m also very sad about the breakage of the Elm plugin for Jetbrains products (I’ve used it quite a bit in PyCharm myself). Would love to see this brought back to life if possible.
Is there any chance of someone being able to take over that plugin, or it being incorporated into the elm-tooling namespace?
If not, there also looks to be an IntelliJ plugin for using language server protocol. It seems the author is having covid issue and put the project on hold, though it looks to be fairly far along in terms of total LSP support. If someone were to use this with the existing language server for Elm then you could build an LSP client.
Not sure what the answer is, but some possible options.
Just upgraded to the latest WebStorm and things started to be pretty unusable. Not sure if it was the Elm plugin but I have ignored its error messages for the last couple of versions so probably.
Anyway wanted to add that having multiple versions of JetBrain IDEs works fine. I just installed Webstorm 2020 where the Elm plugin works and it works just fine for me. Have not much use of the new JS features anyway.
(Looked into the plugin code to see if I could fork it but so much new stuff there to learn and so little time. Hope someone smarter than me will take it over. I would definitely pay a subscription fee for it since this plugin/editor makes my life so much more enjoyable…)
