I’m pretty new to elixir as well, with a similar background as you (IntelliJ for most projects). I found that VSCode was (as you said) surprisingly nice. Refactoring is definitely a challenge, though I can’t say I have found it too much of an issue.

I work in a windows environment, though I prefer linux, and have found that WSL2 with alpine does everything I need. VSCode connects to it directly, and iex is much more pleasant (autocomplete works, pretty colors).

For me the biggest shift, coming from intellij and java and huge unwieldy codebases, is the simplicity. Building systems in Elixir (and they certainly feel and act like systems rather than plain old applications), somehow manages to organize complexity in a clean and manageable way. Having an IDE for Java is almost always necessary because there are often so many pieces flying around that it helps keep them all straight. With Elixir, it all just doesn’t seem so messy.

I hope this helps - your background definitely sounds a lot like mine, so I can understand the initial struggle to get comfortable with Elixir. But certainly it is worth every discomfort and mind-shift.

Personally, I use Doom Emacs with ElixirLS for development. But my general sense is that the majority of Elixir developers now use VSCode (and VSCode is significantly easier to get started with than Emacs). So VSCode is my general recommendation (with ElixirLS and not vscode-elixir since it is not maintained).

With Elixir, it is generally reasonable to use generic project-wide (and sometimes single-file) search and replace to refactor variable names. Or at least reasonable enough that no-one’s created tooling to do context-aware refactoring. But if someone were to implement refactoring in ElixirLS that would be much appreciated and could then be used across a large variety of editors.

You can try Onivim2 which gives you the best of vim and vscode. It is very fast, nice and neat.

@crova and @rodesousa, thank you for sharing! I was hoping to get one of the JetBrains IDEs or VS Code working here, but if vim happens to be the objectively better option here, then I’ll consider switching further down the line. Either way, it’s good to know that there is a good solution out there even if I’m not a fan of it

In VSCode I use CTRL + SHIFT + H to replace something in all files of the project, and then there is this tiny symbol next to the filenames that applies the change, it appears as soon as you select a file.