I have it running, have no idea what "like it does in intellij" means specifically for you, and do not remember that i did something special to make it work. You need to be on the develop branch, though…

Okay thanks I might have another look with the develop branch then

http://develop.spacemacs.org/layers/+misc/parinfer/README.html

There is a parinfer layer in the develop branch.

Not in master yet, that explains your problems.

Smartparens is excellent and not just limited to Clojure/Lisps. It’s already installed and has its own editing state, lisp state built in. If you use Spacemacs with Evil/Vim style, then you can also toggle safe structural editing so vim commands respect your parents. Parinfer I find very distracting and the examples on the website suggest you write broken structures and let parinfer fix your code by adding spaces until it’s the write structure. That just feels very strange and inefficient in terms of typing.