Setting up a Scala development environment based on Emacs, SBT & Ensime

In this post, I will quickly show how to get a productive Scala development environment by using Emacs as an editor, with Scala mode and Ensime as extensions, and SBT as a build tool.
The following assumes that you are running a Linux with emacs already installed and a minimal knowledge on them.

1. Installing Scala

Start by downloading the latest Scala distribution from this page. I usually opt for the tar gz version which I then extract in some directory.

Writing markup the easy way with ZenCoding and emacs

I’ve stumbled upon a nifty extension for emacs (among others) that enables writing HTML using CSS selectors-like expressions.

I don’t know for you, but I do not enjoy writing xml that much. I have nothing against XML itself, it’s just the typing part that annoys me : especially the angle brackets and the closing of tags.

CSS selectors on the other side are written using a compact and an easy-to-type syntax, and while the standard version (used in cascading stylesheets) doesn’t match the xml expressivity, the ZenCoding extended selectors syntax pretty much covers most of the common cases.

Here how it works : this selector :

 html>(head>title)+body>(div#header>h1)+(div#menu>ul>li*4>a href=#)+div#content+div#footer

yields :