IntelliJ getting-started instructions are poor

[SethTisue]

there are a lot of missing or glossed-over steps and choices to make.

I've used IntelliJ and Scala before, but regardless, I found these instructions difficult to follow and I felt very uncertain whether I was doing it right.

I'm skeptical that a new user could follow these instructions without a lot of guesswork and/or outside assistance

[franktominc]

Can I pick it?

[SethTisue]

please!

[SethTisue]

I'm rushed for time at the moment, but off the top of my head, difficulties I encountered included:

• the instructions said to use the GitHub website to make an auth token, but the current version of IntelliJ has built-in support for this that I wasn't sure whether I should use or not
• it's unclear to me why I would even need an auth token to clone a public repo. (probably it isn't needed, but then why is it recommended?)
• in the "Create Project" dialog, the "Finish" button didn't work. it was enabled but did nothing. it took me a while to figure out that I need to choose a Project JDK first before the button would do anything. choosing a Project JDK was quite difficult. it opened a file chooser dialog that dumped me into a JDK 10 directory — it wasn't clear where I was or whether that was the right choice. (probably we should steer people towards Java 8 and not towards some random newer non-LTS version, and certainly not 7 or 6)
• it didn't tell me to paste the "....git" URL into the project creation dialog. maybe obvious, but these things really should be spelled out

that's all I have time to write down right now, but this isn't a full list of all the difficulties and uncertainties I ran into

[SethTisue]

oh, one more thing, I'd suggest adding some steps at the end so someone can make sure it works. perhaps that's supposed to be supplied in the next chapter, but it might not be clear to a new IntelliJ user where to find the sbt prompt in the IntelliJ UI in order to try the sample commands. (is it even intended that that's how IntelliJ users are supposed to proceed? not fully clear to me)

[noelwelsh]

Consider using the IntelliJ Scala Bundle

[SethTisue]

I asked @pavelfatin if there was any reason a student might later regret going the bundle route.

His answer was, they'll be fine unless/until they want to move to a whole new IntelliJ version, at which point their settings won't carry over.

(But note that you can upgrade plugins and add new plugins with the bundle, that works fine. The bundle doesn't include some plugins that someone wanting to use IntelliJ for other languages too might expect to have, but those can be added later.)

It sounds to me like it's fine to recommend to most students.

[pavelfatin]

In principle, it should be possible to keep settings even with a bundle, either by explicitly exporting / importing settings, or by pointing the IDEA's startup wizard to the data/config subdirectory inside the bundle directory (we should probably mention that in the bundle Readme).

(BTW, we have a pretty decent documentation on using Scala in IntelliJ)

[xingyif]

@franktominc for updating the IntelliJ getting-started instruction, this might be helpful as a reference: https://github.com/bogamedia/docs.scala-lang/blob/07e325985066e97226482519aa4ed30b98a6fc1f/getting-started-intellij-track/getting-started-with-scala-in-intellij.md