So far I’ve been writing apps with Groovy+Grails using Notepad++. I don’t tend to like IDEs getting in my way, especially since apparently STS is convinced that it has to do everything with batteries included, which means bundling its own installation of Groovy via the Groovy-Eclipse plugin. A project I’m working on is now getting so large that switching to an IDE would be best, but an even bigger plus would be if I could get STS to point to my local Groovy installation, as it does with the Grails plugin.
How can I get STS to use a local Groovy compiler as opposed to its built-in ones?
Groovy-Eclipse has deep hooks into Eclipse’s Java compiler as well as into Groovy’s compiler. In fact, it ships with a patched version of both. This is the way that you can get incremental compilation, eager parsing, content assist, joint compilation (without using a stub compiler), etc. For this reason, Groovy-Eclipse does not support an external compiler.