Conflict between Sublime Text and Play Framework

Eclipse is the de-facto IDE when working on large Java applications. But its sluggishness makes it quite cumbersome to use for small prototypes. So in order to toy with a small Scala project recently, I decided to just write the snippets of code in Sublime Text as usual.

Initial exception

Everything went easily, the Play Framework installation, the scaffolding of a dummy app and the creation of a couple of models and controllers in Scala.

But a deadly error slapped my console as soon as I entered the run command. A very general java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError, which pointed to almost nowhere when googling for help.

Disk full?

The stack trace was 300 lines long and therefore hard to debug. Hopefully, in the middle of this jungle a clue was hidden : Caused by: net.contentobjects.jnotify.linux.JNotifyException_linux: Error watching /home/projects/app : No space left on device.

My home partition was far from full, so the problem has to be something else. This time the error message led to a more explicit solution. http://jnotify.sourceforge.net/linux.html explains that the issue is about the exhausted inotify watch pool.

Who watch the watchers?

Sublime Text was of course the guilty guy, exploding this inotify limit. After I shut it down, the play run command worked without problems.

Both the text editor and the framework confront each others with their watchers army. In this war I decided that Sublime Text had to lose. Time to switch to another text editor?