Question

I like to edit my scala code with vim because of the developmental state of the Scala plugin for Eclipse. I find this is very suitable for most of my purposes, especially in a screen instance with continuous compilation (mvn scala:cc or ~compile in sbt) in the bottom pane.

The feature I miss most is being able to jump to the source easily. Does anyone know of a way to do this in vim? It should be theoretically possible since all the dependencies are avaiable using maven/sbt.

This question is related to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3626203/text-editor-for-scala, but that question is closed, and the answer was the use emacs, which I could only consider if viper actually makes any sense.

Edit: I wrote a blog post that explores using vim as a full-featured editor for scala.

Answer 1

Use Ctags. Vim has build-in support for it(since Ctags was basically made for vim), but you need to download the program. Ctags doesn’t come with Scala support, but you can configure it to support it(not a Scala user myself, so I haven’t tested it).

You use it to create a tags file for your source files, and than you can easily use it to get to the definition of any function/class/everything in your source code. Ctrl+] to jump to the tag under the cursor. Ctrl+W and then ] to open the tag at a new window. :tag xxx to jump to the definition of xxx. And my personal favorite – g and then ] to show a list of all available tags with that name, and lets you jump to the one you choose – or just use the list to review the declarations(perfect if you forgot what arguments a certain function accepts).