My new favorite thing for development

This is a short post about a handy extension (okay, two).

I fount out about this from Vlad at devinsideyou.com who creates great content about Scala and related tooling and concepts.

Enter Error Lens:

Before installing this, I was using a different lens which displayed the last committer of the corresponding line (blame), or "Not committed yet" if it was a modified or new line. Which sounds like something of interest, but in practice, it mostly just annoyed me.

In contrast, having the error displayed not just in the compiler output, or in a tool window is tremendously useful. It even displays the info messages that Quill generates for compile-time queries:

Which is kind of weird, but okay, I guess. While writing this, I discovered that it can be turned off, which may or may not have been added in an update since I installed it :)

When I started using IDEA for work, for all it's bells and whistles, I was instantly missing this direct feedback. To my absolute delight, someone felt the same, and already created an equivalent plugin: InlineError. In fact, the original Code extension is credited for inspiration!

At first, it would occasionally throw some out of bounds errors, which is annoying, but the usefulness easily outweighs the inconvenience. When I set out to fix it myself, turned out that the creator already took care of it. You need to enable the dev channel for the updates to work, though.

UPDATE 2022-10-20: The out of bounds errors are unfortunately back.

Now, if only some implemented Magit for IDEA...