Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

A longtime coding taboo just got poked with a very smug stick: one developer says you really can escape IntelliJ for Scala and Kotlin work by using Emacs, the famously customizable text editor, plus its built-in language helper, Eglot. The pitch is deliciously rebellious: why live inside a giant all-in-one app when you can use a leaner setup that starts fast, stays light, and can be patched on the fly with a few lines of your own code? For readers outside the nerd bubble, the big claim here is simple: the stuff people said had to be done in a heavyweight editor might actually work in a much smaller one.

But the comments? That’s where the real entertainment started. Some people immediately shrugged and said, basically, “Cool story, but Metals already tells you how to do this,” with one commenter pointing to the official docs and noting that even worksheets work fine. Others went straight for blood on the article’s anti-IntelliJ rant. One user practically did a spit take at the line about a “closed proprietary ecosystem,” firing back with a link to IntelliJ Community Edition as a public reality check. Another accused the post of exaggerating the whole “8GB RAM indexing monster” image, saying IntelliJ has gotten much faster lately.

Then came the fatalistic comedy: one commenter used the sorry state of Java language servers as proof that even today’s AI boom still can’t deliver the goods. And one poor soul admitted they clicked in expecting someone had somehow stolen IntelliJ’s secret sauce and jammed it into Emacs. Honestly? That misunderstanding may be the funniest review of the headline possible.