is intellij idea a good ide for clojure development?

[Dennis Haupt]

the only ides i have used so far for clojure are intellij idea and netbeans. is there one that is a lot better? if yes, why?

i am not interested in details or single features, i just want to know if there is some magic editor out there that i should look into because it is *obviously a lot* better - like in "you should use an ide for java development instead of notepad"

[Josh Kamau]

IMHO, 

All IDEs are good. However, when it comes to clojure development, it depends on the quality of  the plugin. Is the plugin still being maintained and improved? Counterclockwise plugin for eclipse is very popular.  La clojure  plugin for intellij is also very good. Its maintained by the same company that makes intellij. I use intellij... And i am one month old in clojure development.

If you want to be 'cool' use emacs ;)  i am not there yet

regards.

Josh

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Dennis Haupt <d.ha...@gmail.com> wrote:

the only ides i have used so far for clojure are intellij idea and netbeans. is there one that is a lot better? if yes, why?

i am not interested in details or single features, i just want to know if there is some magic editor out there that i should look into because it is *obviously a lot* better - like in "you should use an ide for java development instead of notepad"

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[Jay Fields]

I used IntelliJ for clojure dev for almost 3 years. About six months ago I finally took the time to learn emacs, and I strongly regret not doing it much earlier. There are too many reasons to list, but it all comes down to a simple question for me: do you want the ability to easily automate tasks that you often repeat?

IntelliJ is great at automating some things (e.g. Import namespace), but if you want to extend its functionality it's a significant task. Conversely, I now open my projects with a keystroke, start my app with a keystroke and have the ability to eval any snippet of clojure in the context of my app. I also automated running tests, creating tests that do not exist, and navigating to tests. Finally, paredit - which I could neither adequately praise or explain in one sentence. For me, that equals a level of productivity that is orders of magnitude better than what I had in IntelliJ. 

But, if you simply want the best pre packaged solution, I wouldn't recommend emacs. 

If you want to get started with emacs, give emacs live a look. It's a great starting point. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 28, 2013, at 6:38 AM, Dennis Haupt <d.ha...@gmail.com> wrote:

the only ides i have used so far for clojure are intellij idea and netbeans. is there one that is a lot better? if yes, why?

i am not interested in details or single features, i just want to know if there is some magic editor out there that i should look into because it is *obviously a lot* better - like in "you should use an ide for java development instead of notepad"

--

[larry google groups]

You should keep an eye on LightTable. It is still in very early
development, but at some point this year it may well become the best
environment to use for Clojure coding:

http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/11/05/meet-the-new-light-table/

[Mikera]

On Monday, 28 January 2013 19:37:54 UTC+8, HamsterofDeath wrote:

the only ides i have used so far for clojure are intellij idea and netbeans. is there one that is a lot better? if yes, why?

i am not interested in details or single features, i just want to know if there is some magic editor out there that i should look into because it is *obviously a lot* better - like in "you should use an ide for java development instead of notepad"

As a data point, I have found the Counterclockwise plugin with Eclipse to be excellent. My criteria for this are:

- It works as a full IDE environment, no need to task switch to other tools

- No obvious features lacking that limit your productivity

- Good integration with Java code and tooling, which I also use extensively

Features I like:

- A convenient integrated REPL with lots of shortcuts to quickly execute code

- A good syntax-highlighted editor with various navigation tools (e.g. the Namespace Browser)

- The paredit functionality is very good (does everything I need, at least....)

- Excellent integration with Java projects, to the extent that polyglot Java/Clojure projects are perfectly possible

- Great integrations with tools (I use Git and Maven mostly)

My main niggle is that Leiningen integration isn't as complete or easy as it could be. But I use Maven anyway, so it isn't really a big deal except for when I want to build other peoples' leiningen-based projects.

[Feng Shen]

I have programming Clojure for almost 2 years, for a living.

Emacs is highly recommended. 

Emacs Lisp => lisp, Clojure is also Lisp.  Emacs has special support for Lisp than others.

As for intellj: I think it's quite good. Emacs is the perfect one. 

[Jay Fields]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Feng Shen <she...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have programming Clojure for almost 2 years, for a living.
>

This is probably an important part of what answer the OP is looking
for. When I was doing Clojure for about 10% of my job IntelliJ was
fine. Now that it's 90% of my job, I wouldn't be able to give up emacs
go back to IntelliJ.

If you're just looking at Clojure as a hobby and you already know
IntelliJ, I wouldn't recommend switching. However, if you're going to
be programming Clojure almost all of the time, I think emacs is the
superior choice.

[Laurent PETIT]

Hello Jay,

I'd like to learn a little bit more from what makes you prefer emacs
over IntelliJ.
As the main developer of Counterclockwise, I'm I could learn some
ideas, if not lessons, from your experience.

Some questions and remarks inline:

2013/1/28 Jay Fields <j...@jayfields.com>:

> I used IntelliJ for clojure dev for almost 3 years. About six months ago I
> finally took the time to learn emacs, and I strongly regret not doing it
> much earlier. There are too many reasons to list, but it all comes down to a
> simple question for me: do you want the ability to easily automate tasks
> that you often repeat?

Is this really the core of your concerns? Are you talking about the
ability for you to write new elisp scripts, or to benefit from a bunch
of existing elisp scripts from the emacs community? Is this mostly
related to the fact that Clojure support in IntelliJ is lacking in key
areas? Or is it really the liberty that comes with emacs lisp that you
value overall? (And is it overrated, or not ?)

> IntelliJ is great at automating some things (e.g. Import namespace), but if
> you want to extend its functionality it's a significant task. Conversely, I
> now open my projects with a keystroke,

Can you describe this "open my projects with a keystroke" feature to me?

> start my app with a keystroke

same question. Is it mostly (only?) leiningen apps with a repl ?

> and have the ability to eval any snippet of clojure in the context of my app.

> I also automated running tests, creating tests that do not exist, and
> navigating to tests.

Can you point me to the emacs lisp which does this ? I would be
interested in studying a little bit what kind of API it provides to
you, the user (without digging into tons of reference material: a
concrete example like you automating running tests would be great to
look at)

Thanks,

--
Laurent

[Dennis Haupt]

i don't know emacs, so i would like to know as well what the killer features are that make you more productive with emacs

2013/1/29 Laurent PETIT <lauren...@gmail.com>

[Charlie Griefer]

On Jan 29, 2013, at 9:50 AM, Dennis Haupt <d.ha...@gmail.com> wrote:

i don't know emacs, so i would like to know as well what the killer features are that make you more productive with emacs

With the caveat that I've not used Eclipse or IntelliJ for Clojure development… one thing that I _really_ like about Emacs is that it's lightweight. I prefer an "editor" over a full-blown IDE. Personal preference, I'm aware. But having used other IDEs, they've tended to be resource hogs and ultimately just start acting a bit sluggish.

I can have Emacs open with multiple buffers, multiple windows, IRC, git integration… a "one-stop shop", and at the moment it's using < 200MB of RAM.

I'm not sure if that would be considered a "feature" or not, but to me it's a huge selling point.

(Apologies if this is getting somewhat off of the main topic of whether or not IntelliJ is a good idea for Clojure development, but if we're weighing perceived pros and cons of various options, this is still somewhat on-topic) :)

--

Charlie Griefer

http://charlie.griefer.com

"Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself." 

-- Desiderius Erasmus

[Rich Morin]

On Jan 29, 2013, at 08:50, Dennis Haupt wrote:
> i don't know emacs, so i would like to know as well what the killer features
> are that make you more productive with emacs

Me two. More generally, I'm interested in features that DON'T require filling
my head with zillions of obscure key sequences.

-r

--
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume r...@cfcl.com
http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841

Software system design, development, and documentation

[Softaddicts]

I worked with one of the first version of Emacs written in Teco on a DEC-20 in the 80s
then on unixes and VMS computer. I still remember some key bindings but I need to
resort to online help a lot to bring back key bindings in my working memory.

We use Eclipse/ccw but I think that the same reasoning can apply to other "complex" IDEs.

The main reasons why I sticked with Eclipse were:

a) we had a polyglot app with more Java and JRuby than Clojure, not true anymore
but we still use many Java external libs and some Rails GUIs. Adding plugins to
support these in Eclipse is straightforward.
The later may apply as well to Emacs when you already learned it for a specific language but it does not look obvious to me from my initial research in 2009/2010.

b) as I age, I have less brain estate to memorize multiple dev tools, sticking with
Eclipse in a polyglot app made more sense. Many shortcuts are common between
the different editors so the learning curve was easier than alternate with Emacs and relearning everything nearly twice.

Now, all of you young people laughing about the above (chouser, I hear you loud)
should consider that one day you will all forget were you dropped your car keys that you had in your hand 3 mns ago. This an aging process that you cannot avoid yet even if you get Botox injections every week :) I agree, better laugh than feel
sorrow about it.

c) Debugging with Eclipse in Java, JRuby or Clojure looks to me simpler to do than in emacs especially if you need to investigate at a low level in different languages.
The debugger is the same. Honestly, I cannot really compare feature by feature with Emacs on this but my guess from what I read is that Emacs is less convenient in this regard.

d) in the "early days", it seemed awkward to get Emacs up and running, these days
given the minimal emails about this issue it seems to be behind us.
However in my case the damage is done :) I may go back to Emacs when I have some spare time to test it against our code base but this is unlikely to happen in the near future, time is scarce resource and this is a project by itself.

I agree that these IDEs consume more resources but I mitigated the issue
with an I7/8Gig/SSD laptop for around 1000$ :) Let the computer do the boring
work and preserve that neural drive for a better use.

Luc P.

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[Jay Fields]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Laurent PETIT <lauren...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Jay,
>
> I'd like to learn a little bit more from what makes you prefer emacs
> over IntelliJ.
> As the main developer of Counterclockwise, I'm I could learn some
> ideas, if not lessons, from your experience.

Sure, responses inline-

> 2013/1/28 Jay Fields <j...@jayfields.com>:

>> There are too many reasons to list, but it all comes down to a
>> simple question for me: do you want the ability to easily automate tasks
>> that you often repeat?
>
> Is this really the core of your concerns? Are you talking about the
> ability for you to write new elisp scripts, or to benefit from a bunch
> of existing elisp scripts from the emacs community? Is this mostly
> related to the fact that Clojure support in IntelliJ is lacking in key
> areas? Or is it really the liberty that comes with emacs lisp that you
> value overall? (And is it overrated, or not ?)

What's already written is great (clojure-mode, paredit, magit, ace
jump) and the ability to extend via elisp is equally nice. Here's a
"grep defun init.el"
(defun run-expectations () ;;; run all the tests for my project
(defun run-expectations-for-source () ;;; run the tests for the src
file I'm currently editing
(defun rerun-last-run-expectations () ;;; rerun the last tests,
regardless of what buffer I'm in
(defun toggle-expectations-and-src () ;;; go to test for src or src
for test, depending on which I'm already in
(defun clojure-comment-sexp () ;;; comment an entire sexp instead of
only commenting a line
(defun switch-project (project-root) ;;; close all buffers, restart
the repl, set my project dir, etc
(defun grep-string-in-project (s) ;;; find a string in my project
(defun grep-string-in (s project-root) ;;; find a string in a dir -
defaulted to my project root
(defun default-window-layout () ;;; layout my buffers in my usual way
(two pane, src & test)
(defun console-layout () ;;; layout my buffers with src on left and
logs on right
(defun clear-nrepl-server-output () ;;; no matter what buffer I'm in,
clear the output in the nrepl server buffer
(defun create-clj-function () ;;; create a new function with the name
of the currently selected symbol
(defun extract-let (var-name) ;;; extract a let with the currently selected sexp
(defun inline-let-var () ;;; inline instances of a var from my let

Basically, I can switch to a project, set my buffers (split horizontal
or vertical), search, run tests, & run the app all with commands that
I've defined (or keystrokes that I've defined).

>> IntelliJ is great at automating some things (e.g. Import namespace), but if
>> you want to extend its functionality it's a significant task. Conversely, I
>> now open my projects with a keystroke,
>
> Can you describe this "open my projects with a keystroke" feature to me?

the elisp
(defun switch-project (project-root)
(interactive (list (read-directory-name "Project Root: "
(locate-dominating-file default-directory "project.clj"))))
(nrepl-quit)
(when (equal current-prefix-arg nil)
(mapc 'kill-buffer (buffer-list)))
(cd project-root)
(nrepl-jack-in))

in english
select the project root, kill any currently running nrepl,
conditionally kill all existing buffers, set my working dir, start a
new repl. At that point I can navigate (C-x C-f **) to my "main"
namespace and run my "start" function (C-x C-e ***) to start my
project in the context of my newly running repl. The bottom of my main
namespace will probably look like
(comment
(start)
)
So, I go to the space following the closing parenthesis on the start
line and C-x C-e to evaluate (start) - which starts my app.

Now my app is running and I can C-x C-e on any sexp in my codebase to
change anything. I can stop/start any third party connections, reload
configuration files, send fake data to the UI, or anything else I
want. Since I can evaluate any snippet of code in the context of my
app, I can do anything. Often it's as simple as simply looking at the
values of an atom or ref, but it can also be: reload the config file
to pick up a change I just made to point to a new 3rd party server,
restart the 3rd party connections, redefine the 3rd party data handler
to print the incoming data, then redefine the 3rd party data handler
to store it in the appropriate atom, then print the value of the atom
for verification.

I have an interactive environment that I can eval any snippet in. I
can develop new features without starting and stopping my server, and
see the changes immediately.

** Find file
*** Evaluate the Emacs Lisp expression before point, and print the
value in the echo area (eval-last-sexp).

>> start my app with a keystroke
>
> same question. Is it mostly (only?) leiningen apps with a repl ?

Answered above, but, yes, a leiningen app, connected to emacs with nrepl-jack-in

>> I also automated running tests, creating tests that do not exist, and
>> navigating to tests.
>
> Can you point me to the emacs lisp which does this ? I would be
> interested in studying a little bit what kind of API it provides to
> you, the user (without digging into tons of reference material: a
> concrete example like you automating running tests would be great to
> look at)

https://github.com/gar3thjon3s/expectations-mode allows you to run
expectations in emacs
http://blog.jayfields.com/2012/11/elisp-automated-switching-between.html
automated navigation

Basically, emacs comes with a fn that allows me to figure out what the
project root is, then I use convention to determine where a test
should live (and create it if it doesn't exist), then I run it using
what's already available in expectations-mode, or switch to that
buffer using what emacs exposes to switch to buffer (a.k.a "open
files").

I'm not sure if that's clear, but I'm happy to send more if you have
more questions.

Cheers, Jay

[Jay Fields]

Rich, almost all keystrokes have names you can use from M-x - if you
prefer that to keystrokes.

[Josh Kamau]

Question: Is this emacs also good in other stuff such as javascript/css/html/sql .... Most of my projects involve writing this as well .   Does anyone have a link to an up to date instructions on how to setup emacs for clojure ? most of what i find are out of date... e.g some talk of swank-clojure and i read somewhere that i should use nRepl or something like that. 

regards.

Josh.

[Timo Mihaljov]

For what it's worth, I switched from Emacs to Eclipse and
Counterclockwise for Clojure programming. Laurent's done an excellent
job with it, and I even prefer his take on paredit over Emacs's
original. I still use Emacs for everything else, but for Clojure I find
Counterclockwise to be "the superior choice".


--
Timo

[Jay Fields]

I use it for Clojure, html, css, & js - no sql tho, so I can't comment
on that. Otherwise, everything is great.

I use emacs-live, which you can add to a vanilla emacs install and get
right started. All you need to nrepl-jack-in.

[Josh Kamau]

Thanks Jay... Emacs live looks funtastic... I will give emacs another try. 

Josh

[László Török]

+1 emacs live

Id seriously discourage any Emacs newbie trying vanilla Emacs for Clojure development.

Here, I'd also like to express my greatest appreciation to the creators for publishing and maintaining it.

Las
Sent from my phone

[Phil Hagelberg]

Jay Fields writes:

> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 11:45 AM, Laurent PETIT <lauren...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello Jay,
>>
>> I'd like to learn a little bit more from what makes you prefer emacs
>> over IntelliJ.
>> As the main developer of Counterclockwise, I'm I could learn some
>> ideas, if not lessons, from your experience.
>
> Sure, responses inline-

While it's great to list features, the specific features really aren't
the point--the point is that new features can be added with very little
friction. If you had to restart the program and lose all the state
you've built up just to try out a new command you're going to be less
likely to bother with it, but if you can just open up your dotfiles,
bash out a new defn and try it incrementally, you're going to be more
likely to experiment with the little things.

I blogged (ranted?) a bit about this a while ago: http://technomancy.us/115

But perhaps it's redundant to praise at length the benefits of a
repl-driven workflow to this audience. =)

-Phil

[Dennis Haupt]

you can do repl driven development with intellij as well i think.

--

[Sean Corfield]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Dennis Haupt <d.ha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> you can do repl driven development with intellij as well i think.

I'm pretty sure Phil meant you can modify your editor (Emacs) using a
REPL-driven approach - which is not true of IntellIj.
--
Sean A Corfield -- (904) 302-SEAN
An Architect's View -- http://corfield.org/
World Singles, LLC. -- http://worldsingles.com/

"Perfection is the enemy of the good."
-- Gustave Flaubert, French realist novelist (1821-1880)

[Rich Morin]

On Jan 29, 2013, at 14:05, Phil Hagelberg wrote:
> While it's great to list features, the specific features really aren't
> the point--the point is that new features can be added with very little

> friction. ...

This begs the question: what would be the lowest amount of friction that
we should try for? One answer, it seems to me, is that there should be
an easy way to add features _using Clojure_. I realize that this would
not be a general solution, but it might make a lot of Clojurists smile.

I realize that Emacs Lisp is "pretty close to Clojure". However, if we
wanted to be programming in some other form of Lisp, we'd be doing that.
So, if any editor mavens out there want my vote, here's a way to get it.

[Jay Fields]

I could define repl driven development in a lot of ways. If I'm in a
clj file is there an easy way to evaluate a sexp in the context of the
repl? Just having a repl that I cut and paste from is not a similar
experience.

Sent from my iPhone

[Lee Spector]

On Jan 29, 2013, at 5:28 PM, Rich Morin wrote:
>
> This begs the question: what would be the lowest amount of friction that
> we should try for? One answer, it seems to me, is that there should be
> an easy way to add features _using Clojure_. I realize that this would
> not be a general solution, but it might make a lot of Clojurists smile.
>
> I realize that Emacs Lisp is "pretty close to Clojure". However, if we
> wanted to be programming in some other form of Lisp, we'd be doing that.
> So, if any editor mavens out there want my vote, here's a way to get it.

I know I probably bring this up too often... but once upon a time there was a Common Lisp programming environment with an editor called FRED (= FRED Resembles Emacs Deliberately) that had: 1) the power of emacs, 2) the ease of use of a modern, platform native text editing application, and 3) self-programability in Common Lisp. It was really nice. IMHO it would be heavenly if we could have something like this for Clojure. From what I can tell the people in this community have ample skills to make this happen if they share the vision and have the time, etc.

-Lee

[Laurent PETIT]

2013/1/29 Rich Morin <r...@cfcl.com>:

> On Jan 29, 2013, at 14:05, Phil Hagelberg wrote:
>> While it's great to list features, the specific features really aren't
>> the point--the point is that new features can be added with very little
>> friction. ...
>
> This begs the question: what would be the lowest amount of friction that
> we should try for? One answer, it seems to me, is that there should be
> an easy way to add features _using Clojure_. I realize that this would
> not be a general solution, but it might make a lot of Clojurists smile.
>
> I realize that Emacs Lisp is "pretty close to Clojure". However, if we
> wanted to be programming in some other form of Lisp, we'd be doing that.
> So, if any editor mavens out there want my vote, here's a way to get it.

Then stay tuned, we may talk about this again in a few month ... for CCW ;-)

>
> -r
>
> --
> http://www.cfcl.com/rdm Rich Morin
> http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/resume r...@cfcl.com
> http://www.cfcl.com/rdm/weblog +1 650-873-7841
>
> Software system design, development, and documentation
>
>

[Laurent PETIT]

2013/1/29 Jay Fields <j...@jayfields.com>:

> I could define repl driven development in a lot of ways. If I'm in a
> clj file is there an easy way to evaluate a sexp in the context of the
> repl? Just having a repl that I cut and paste from is not a similar
> experience.

Of course CCW does that for years:
- Ctlr+Enter inside any top level expr in a file sends it for
evaluation in the REPL.
- Select (via paredit !) an expression, and then Ctrl+Enter, will send
the selection only for evaluation in the REPL.

[Niels van Klaveren]

Another vote for Eclipse/CCW over Netbeans and IntelliJ. I used all three, and CCW's development has proven to be consistently better than plugins for the other IDE's. Both CCW's excellent Leiningen and REPL support, as the option to link projects when working on multiple sources at the same time have proven to be indispensable.

As for Emacs, in my opinion you'd best get a good grip on Clojure development before taking on the whole new learning curve Emacs will pose. CCW's `strict` mode is almost on par with Emacs paredit, and will be when Barf/Slurp are introduced in the not too distant future.

[Laurent PETIT]

2013/1/31 Niels van Klaveren <niels.va...@gmail.com>:

> Another vote for Eclipse/CCW over Netbeans and IntelliJ. I used all three,
> and CCW's development has proven to be consistently better than plugins for
> the other IDE's. Both CCW's excellent Leiningen and REPL support, as the
> option to link projects when working on multiple sources at the same time
> have proven to be indispensable.
>
> As for Emacs, in my opinion you'd best get a good grip on Clojure
> development before taking on the whole new learning curve Emacs will pose.
> CCW's `strict` mode is almost on par with Emacs paredit, and will be when
> Barf/Slurp are introduced in the not too distant future.

which will in fact be the next release, since Tom Hickey added it and
the push request has been issued !

>
>
> On Monday, January 28, 2013 12:37:54 PM UTC+1, HamsterofDeath wrote:
>>
>> the only ides i have used so far for clojure are intellij idea and
>> netbeans. is there one that is a lot better? if yes, why?
>> i am not interested in details or single features, i just want to know if
>> there is some magic editor out there that i should look into because it is
>> *obviously a lot* better - like in "you should use an ide for java
>> development instead of notepad"
>

[Chris Gill]

I find this interesting. I've been using light table mostly, but recently I tried my hand at socket programming and light table flopped on this type of a project. I ended up using lein repl for most of my work which became a pain and now I'm looking at emacs with a slight kink in my lips. I'll have to try eclipse for clojure out, I've only ever done android in eclipse. Do you think something like an openGL project in clojure in eclipse with live-editing is a possibility? I've mostly seen this kind of stuff in emacs but I feel like it has less to do with emacs and more with nrepl and evaling..

-c

[Greg]

Everyone has their preferences, and the best thing to do is to try it all and pick what you like.

That said... here's my experience with IntelliJ, and others

Table of Contents:

1. On IntelliJ

2. On Emacs and "Emacs Live"

3. On Light Table

4. On Sublime Text (ST)

5. Conclusion

1. On IntelliJ

-----------------

I've tried Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ for Java development.

Of those, I only tried IntelliJ for Clojure development because I despise Eclipse's bloat and poor UI design, and Netbeans, while better (IMO), just isn't as slick and fast, and... intelligent :-p as IntelliJ. I really cannot wrap my head around why so many people like Eclipse. I think it must be a Mac/Windows-type phenomenon or something. There I've gone and pissed off half the users on this list... :-p

IntelliJ's La Clojure and Leiningen plugins are alright. They have some code sense autocompletion stuff, and you can jump to definitions (to an extent, it doesn't always work).

Overall it's my 2nd favorite choice for Clojure only because it too, is too bloated for my liking. Not as bloated as the other two "big IDEs", but still bloated.

2. On Emacs and "Emacs Live"

----------------------------------------

I've used Emacs off and on for about 3 years now. I spent weeks, probably months customizing it, trying out the emacs-starter-kit and making it my own. I let it along after I went on a Clojure sabbatical for a while and lived in Xcode.

When I came back, I saw this "Emacs Live" project and decided to give emacs one more shot because of it.

IMO, it sucks. Emacs is always going to suck from a UI and GTD perspective. It will only be embraced by the hardcore tinkerers who get a kick out of spending equal time tinkering with their editor as they do actual coding. It's kinda like the software equivalent of owning a Harley Davidson, except you look a nerd instead of an intimidating biker.

Emacs Live is also slow. Out of the box it's slow to launch on my fast 2010 MBP 2.4Ghz Core i5 with 8GB of RAM and an SSD. They'll tell ya to run emacsclient and all that but it's just more bullshit.

If you like tinkering and memorizing a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, go with Emacs. Make sure you have a nice IRC client though because you're going to need it when things stop working. Emacs has one built-in btw, but you might need to get a regular GUI-based IRC client first, you know, so that you can figure out the Emacs-based one. :-p

3. On Light Table

-----------------------

Light Table seems promising but in my testing it's not ready for daily use, mostly due to lack of plugins and missing features.

4. On Sublime Text (ST)

--------------------------------

Sublime Text is fucking awesome. This is my #1 choice for Clojure development.

While ST3 is in beta, it's best to use version 2 because many plugins, including the REPL integration via the SublimeREPL plugin, only work with version 2. There are some issues with nREPL at the moment, so use this fork until they can fix it in the main project (found via Github Issues): https://github.com/emestee/SublimeREPL

ST has many things going for it:

- Incredible customization via hundreds of plugins supported by a giant community

- Brilliant plugin and customization system that puts Emacs to shame in terms of balance between power and usability

- Fast. And faster launch times than Emacs Live

- Beautiful UI with many different color schemes and themes available (note: themes are not the same thing as syntax color schemes. I recommend the Soda Dark theme with Monkai Soda coloring.

- Built-in package manager for plugins, with the option to install plugins without using it too.

- Organized settings that use the well known and very readable JSON format. You don't have code mixed with settings like you do with Emacs, and there is a standard place that everything is supposed to go, unlike the free-for-all nightmare that Emacs has.

- There's a paredit plugin available for it if you care (I don't, and haven't used it).

It's worth spending some time customizing Sublime Text, but the good news is that your time won't be spent in vain, and once you have it set up the way you like, there's no need to continue tinkering like crazy.

5. Conclusion

-----------------

- Yes, IntelliJ is a very good IDE for Clojure development.

- Sublime Text is better. :-)

- Cross your fingers for Light Table

Cheers,

Greg

--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.

[Sean Corfield]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Greg <gr...@kinostudios.com> wrote:
> 1. On IntelliJ
> 2. On Emacs and "Emacs Live"
> 3. On Light Table
> 4. On Sublime Text (ST)
> 5. Conclusion

I've tried IntelliJ several times and just can't on with the way it
operates. Clearly a very personal thing. I used to use Eclipse a lot -
a background in languages where Eclipse support was typically better
than other IDEs at the time I got started with them - but it is really
bloated and trying to use it on a low-powered Ubuntu netbook was the
final straw for me, which is a shame because I think Counter ClockWise
is an excellent plugin and Eclipse overall fitted my workflow better
than anything else (a few years back).

I used Emacs a lot in the 17/18/19 days (I caught the tail end of 17,
all of 18, and stopped using it just after 19 appeared). Back then, it
was "the business" (I was mostly a C developer back then). More on
Emacs below.

LightTable is indeed very, very interesting. I am trying to use it
exclusively one day a week for all that day's work, but the lack of
Git integration drives me bonkers (I know there will be a plugin for
it in time). I also haven't quite figured out my REPL-based workflow
in LT.

When I started doing Clojure, I used TextMate so it was an obvious
choice to try Sublime Text 2. I tried it on Mac, Windows, and Linux
and it drove me insane with its quirks, bugs, inconsistencies across
platforms and (at the time) very poor REPL integration. I know it's
gotten better but I just found it clunky and the workflow felt hacked
together. That said, three of my team love ST2.

In October 2011, I decided to give Emacs another chance - specifically
for Clojure development - and that's what I use day-in, day-out. I
have a slightly customized setup but it really doesn't have much
beyond the starter kit, rainbow delimiters and autocompletion added.
It has a huge learning curve (nay, a _cliff_!) but it is hands down
the best Clojure environment (in my opinion - and about 70% of all
Clojure developers surveyed, according to Chas's surveys).

Coming back to Emacs after about a 20 year break(!), I was surprised
to see it had only advanced to version 24 (in fact, back in October
2011, 24 was only a preview build), and it took a fair bit of getting
used to (again). Since then, two of my team have also switched
full-time from ST2 to Emacs. The third does a lot of front end web dev
and finds ST2 easier to work with - but I suspect when she starts
doing Clojure / ClojureScript work, she'll switch too.

[Lee Spector]

On Jul 25, 2013, at 3:37 PM, Sean Corfield wrote:
>
> In October 2011, I decided to give Emacs another chance - specifically
> for Clojure development - and that's what I use day-in, day-out. I
> have a slightly customized setup but it really doesn't have much
> beyond the starter kit, rainbow delimiters and autocompletion added.
> It has a huge learning curve (nay, a _cliff_!) but it is hands down
> the best Clojure environment (in my opinion - and about 70% of all
> Clojure developers surveyed, according to Chas's surveys).
>
> Coming back to Emacs after about a 20 year break(!), I was surprised
> to see it had only advanced to version 24 (in fact, back in October
> 2011, 24 was only a preview build), and it took a fair bit of getting
> used to (again). Since then, two of my team have also switched
> full-time from ST2 to Emacs. The third does a lot of front end web dev
> and finds ST2 easier to work with - but I suspect when she starts
> doing Clojure / ClojureScript work, she'll switch too.

For Sean or anyone who finds Sean's narrative compelling (I do), imagine emacs without the learning curve! I say it's possible and I point to the long-extinct FRED (Fred Resembles Emacs Deliberately) that was part of Macintosh Common Lisp as a proof of principle. I don't have the time or chops to develop such a thing, but if anyone here does then this would be a way to make the world a better place.

-Lee

[Ryan Stradling]

I have used Vi, emacs, and IntelliJ for Clojure.

I have used eclipse on non Clojure projects but it is not my default choice.  I typically choose IntelliJ over eclipse when that type of environment is needed.

I had a very capable set-up in IntelliJ.  There are still some issues with the Clojure plugin especially if you are used to paredit.

I naturally gravitate towards Vi when choosing between emacs or Vi.  Vim-fireplace is really good if Vim is something you would like.

Emacs though IMHO is still the best one out there of what I have tried.  With all the others, I feel that I miss the interactive REPL experience I get with emacs.  That, ergo-mode, and Caps Lock mapped to the ctrl key are what brought me back to it.

Daily I use emacs.  When needed, I use IntelliJ.  (For instance I was writing a plug-in in Clojure for a Java application.  I did not know the Java application well at all and had a hard to find issue.  I fired up IntelliJ, and I was able to debug in Java and Clojure and found the issue rather quickly.)

[Laurent PETIT]

tl;dr: why not at least *try* Counterclockwise before skipping it
'because of Eclipse'? You may find its editor with paredit shortcuts
appealing. A full standalone Eclipse+Counterclockwise is available for
your platform here:
http://updatesite.ccw-ide.org/branch/master/master-travis000102-git75512b6843a242e2ab3c9f4057c42c884653b2ea/products/


I'm a bit sad when I read people don't want to try Counterclockwise
just because they had a prior bad experience with Eclipse.

Not even giving it a try, c'mon guys, please ;-)

I have been working on the automation of build and delivery recently,
and for instance giving it a try is as easy as:

1. download the standalone version for your OS from here:

http://updatesite.ccw-ide.org/branch/master/master-travis000102-git75512b6843a242e2ab3c9f4057c42c884653b2ea/products/
(pretty stable version, stick to this link please)

It's a big download, but you have everything included (Eclipse base +
Counterclockwise + Leiningen + Eclipse Git ...)

2. Unzip into a directory named e.g. counterclockwise

3. Locate counterclockwise / counterclockwise.app /
counterclockwise.exe depending on your platform, and start it !

Even if you still don't like the beast, some feedback on what you
liked / disliked will always be appreciated since new viewpoints are
generally challenging and interesting!

Cheers,

--
Laurent


2013/7/25 Ryan Stradling <ryanst...@gmail.com>:

[Colin Fleming]

Hi Laurent,

Thanks for those links, I'll try the standalone version. I recently tried to set up CCW, I got it running but several of the Paredit keybindings didn't work for me and they didn't appear in the shortcut preferences either. I'm definitely in the "have always hated Eclipse" camp but I'll give the standalone version a try and let you know how I get on. If I have problems I'll post them to the CCW list.

Thanks for all the hard work, CCW has really come a long way!

Cheers,

Colin

[Laurent PETIT]

2013/7/26 Colin Fleming <colin.ma...@gmail.com>:

> Hi Laurent,
>
> Thanks for those links, I'll try the standalone version. I recently tried to
> set up CCW, I got it running but several of the Paredit keybindings didn't
> work for me and they didn't appear in the shortcut preferences either. I'm
> definitely in the "have always hated Eclipse" camp but I'll give the
> standalone version a try and let you know how I get on. If I have problems
> I'll post them to the CCW list.
>
> Thanks for all the hard work, CCW has really come a long way!

Hi Colin, thanks for the kind words!

If you're feeling a little bit more adventurous, you can also try the
brand new feature I've been introducing this week: AutoShift! (tl;dr:
fix indentation as you type)

More on this (explanations, links, etc.) in this thread:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/clojuredev-users/F-gm5I5ZYUs/HZek6XA8u7MJ

Also, please note that I'll be on holidays during August, so dont
expect too quick a response ;-)

[Cedric Greevey]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Greg <gr...@kinostudios.com> wrote:

Everyone has their preferences, and the best thing to do is to try it all and pick what you like.

That said... here's my experience with IntelliJ, and others

Table of Contents:

1. On IntelliJ

2. On Emacs and "Emacs Live"

3. On Light Table

4. On Sublime Text (ST)

5. Conclusion

1. On IntelliJ

-----------------

Not free software.

2. On Emacs and "Emacs Live"

----------------------------------------

Free software. (But apparently it's now bloated all the way up to being "eight gigabytes and constantly swapping", if Greg's report is any indication.)

 

3. On Light Table

-----------------------

Seems to be up in the air whether this will be free software or not.

4. On Sublime Text (ST)

--------------------------------

Non-free.

5. Conclusion

-----------------

If you want free software and don't want bloat, "none of the above". Maybe try clooj?

- Yes, IntelliJ is a very good IDE for Clojure development.

- Sublime Text is better. :-)

Neither of those choices are libre software.

[Laurent PETIT]

Hello Cedric,

2013/7/26 Cedric Greevey <cgre...@gmail.com>:

> On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Greg <gr...@kinostudios.com> wrote:
>>
>> Everyone has their preferences, and the best thing to do is to try it all
>> and pick what you like.
>>
>> That said... here's my experience with IntelliJ, and others
>>
>> Table of Contents:
>> 1. On IntelliJ
>> 2. On Emacs and "Emacs Live"
>> 3. On Light Table
>> 4. On Sublime Text (ST)
>> 5. Conclusion
>>
>> 1. On IntelliJ
>> -----------------
>
>
> Not free software.

AFAICT, the "Community Edition" is free software, and all that is
required to use Clojure.

>> 5. Conclusion
>> -----------------
>
>
> If you want free software and don't want bloat, "none of the above". Maybe
> try clooj?
>
>>
>> - Yes, IntelliJ is a very good IDE for Clojure development.
>> - Sublime Text is better. :-)
>
>
> Neither of those choices are libre software.

Eclipse is as free as Clojure can bee (both are licensed with the EPL
V1.0), and so is Counterclockwise.

My 0,02€,

--
Laurent

[Gary Trakhman]

You can pick and choose your level of bloat with emacs.

It's pretty good at being a lisp editor.  I don't customize mine much, been using it for a year and a half, and I was 80% as productive as I am now within just a few weeks, though I realize there's a lifetime left to learn.

Starter-kit + 24-lines init.el for auto-complete and a color theme, and I'm pretty happy.

My only complaints:

1. Evaluating something that prints a lot by accident locks the UI.

2. I can't use it for java for more than a couple hours at a time.

Memory usage is only 48MB on my linux, using the GTK interface.

[Colin Fleming]

Laurent is correct - both the IntelliJ community edition and La Clojure are Apache licensed.

[Cedric Greevey]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 7:06 PM, Colin Fleming <colin.ma...@gmail.com> wrote:

Laurent is correct - both the IntelliJ community edition and La Clojure are Apache licensed.

On 26 July 2013 11:02, Laurent PETIT <lauren...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello Cedric,

>> 1. On IntelliJ
>> -----------------
>
>
> Not free software.

AFAICT, the "Community Edition" is free software, and all that is
required to use Clojure.

Huh. That's news to me. The one time I evaluated IntelliJ, there was no sign of this.

It isn't severely crippled, though, is it?

[Colin Fleming]

Nope, it's perfectly functional as long as all you want is "basic" functionality - Java, XML/XPath/XSLT, Git/SVN, Android, Maven/Ant, Groovy, JUnit/TestNG and of course Clojure if you install La Clojure. If you want any of the Enterprise Java stuff you have to go to the Ultimate edition. Probably the most obviously missing thing is HTML/Javascript support.

[Anand Prakash]

Would agree with Laurent. For newbies, I would not recommend anything apart from Eclipse. It's really stable and I have been using it for multiple projects over the past year. It just work. I really love the integrated REPL and ability to debug with breakpoints.

I spent 5-6 years with Eclipse and then tried Intellij Idea for 2 years and loved it. However with CCW I do not have any of the issues that people have with eclipse,  because clojure vm is very lightweight. I start eclipse, start the repl and then keep using it without any restart for weeks. Any code that I change is live loaded into REPL.

Thanks

Anand

[Korny Sietsma]

Indeed - I was using a community-edition intellij setup the other day, and only realised when I went to edit some JavaScript, and found some features missing (like code indenting).

We use intellij (mostly) in our team at work, and I use emacs (mostly) at home.

My current take on this endless debate:

Intellij is ok.  For multi-language projects it's probably still the best option - it does a great job with Java, JavaScript, html, css.  The clojure support, with the leiningen plugin, works most of the time - with a few hassles:

- jump to definition breaks sometimes, especially if you use "use" or "require :all" - for some reason it can understand prefixed namespaces a lot better.

- indenting isn't nearly as good as emacs

- it doesn't use a long-running repl for tasks like compilation, so you have to wait for the clojure startup a lot; every time you re-run tests for example. 

- a few language features break their parser - inine bigdecimals for a start, adding "0.01M" tends to break syntax highlighting

- you have to use the leiningen plugin to sync up your project dependencies, and manually re-sync when things change

- the leiningen plugin breaks if you have more than one clojure module in a project - not a problem for everyone, but very annoying for us!

Emacs is powerful, and fast (not sure where the "bloat" comments come from, it takes less than 3 seconds to load on my MacBook Pro, and that's usually once per session, so I don't care much.

However, it has a horrible learning curve - I'm past the worst of it, but it's a struggle to learn, and only something you'd do if you are keen.  Fine for the solo developer, but not much good for a team, especially in a consulting situation - I can't go to the client company's developers and say "here's this awesome new language to use - oh, and you also need to learn emacs..."  :-}

Also Emacs sucks for Java development, and isn't nearly as good as Intellij for JavaScript, html, and css.  I also miss all the nice things you get from a real gui - graphical diff markings, subtle ui indicators for VCS changes, tooltips that pop up; and mostly I really miss having a tree-view of the project when I'm working in emacs - speedbar is a very very poor replacement!

Sublime, last time I tried, had a very nice UI and a great plugin system - but the clojure stuff seemed fairly broken.  I couldn't get the repl to work properly; I'm glad to hear it's working now.  Does it support autcompletion, and jumping to a symbol's definition (and back again)?  Those didn't seem to be there last time, and I'd struggle to live without them on a project of any size.

CounterClockwise is nice - I tried it a few months back, and it seemed like a good environment - but Eclipse is ugly and painful to use compared to IntelliJ, and as my team is building a multi-language project, we can't avoid using the non-clojure bits.  If I had a pure clojure project, in a team environment, I'd definitely consider it.

- Korny

--

Kornelis Sietsma  korny at my surname dot com http://korny.info

.fnord { display: none !important; }

[Gary Trakhman]

'jumping to a symbol's definition (and back again)?  Those didn't seem to be there last time, and I'd struggle to live without them on a project of any size.'

Besides paredit, this is absolutely the most important feature for me day-to-day.  Nothing will replace emacs unless it has that.  The emacs one follows a stack-discipline, which is brilliant, and can even follow into dependency jars.

[kovas boguta]

I'm developing a stand-alone paredit widget, basically connecting paredit.clj to a swing text area. 

As part of my research, I've spent the last few days looking into intellij, and the la clojure source.

One gets the feeling that eclipse and netbeans have hit a wall of designed-by-committee technical debt. Google's switching to intellij for its android development tools is a big vote of confidence as well. 

The problem with La Clojure is that its implementation 100% java. The intellij apis seem sensibly designed, but being java there is a mountain of classes. There is no way to keep up with ccw through writing java code. 

Given that the community edition is open source, theres a wide open opportunity for a clojure-based editor on top of intellij, as a plugin or as a stand-alone app.

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 3:37 AM, Dennis Haupt <d.ha...@gmail.com> wrote:

the only ides i have used so far for clojure are intellij idea and netbeans. is there one that is a lot better? if yes, why?

i am not interested in details or single features, i just want to know if there is some magic editor out there that i should look into because it is *obviously a lot* better - like in "you should use an ide for java development instead of notepad"

--

[Lee Spector]

On Jul 25, 2013, at 8:22 PM, Anand Prakash wrote:

> Would agree with Laurent. For newbies, I would not recommend anything apart from Eclipse.

For real newbies I'd second the earlier mention of clooj. It's really the simplest thing to get and use that integrates a Clojure-aware editor and a REPL. Of course it could use a lot more features, and more people to help maintain it, but in my experience it's tops in terms of ease of use for newbies.

-Lee

[Greg]

'jumping to a symbol's definition (and back again)?  Those didn't seem to be there last time, and I'd struggle to live without them on a project of any size.'

Besides paredit, this is absolutely the most important feature for me day-to-day.  Nothing will replace emacs unless it has that.  The emacs one follows a stack-discipline, which is brilliant, and can even follow into dependency jars.

Yes, Sublime Text (both 2 and 3) have the ability to jump to a symbol (there's probably a way to switch to the previous view also, not sure what the shortcut is for that).

ST3 has a built-in "Go to definition" menu item that ST2 doesn't have. I haven't tried that yet with Clojure though because a bunch of awesome ST2 plugins haven't yet been ported to ST3.

ST2 has an awesome plugin (that just merged a patch I sent in today) called Find Function Definition. It's a great hack for implementing "Go to definition". To get it to work nicely with clojure, just copy/paste this into your User Settings for that plugin:

{

"definitions":

[

// the extra space at the end is important!

// otherwise foo will match a function def of foo-bar

"(defn $NAME$ ",

"(defn- $NAME$ ",

"(defn ^URL $NAME$ ",

"(defn ^String $NAME$ ",

"(defn ^File $NAME$ ",

"(defmacro $NAME$ ",

"class $NAME$ ", // java class

// but sometimes they will put a newline instead of a space

// so if the above fail, try these:

"(defmacro $NAME$",

"(defn $NAME$",

"(defn- $NAME$",

"(defn ^URL $NAME$",

"(defn ^String $NAME$",

"(defn ^File $NAME$",

// if jumping becomes too slow, comment out the following

"(def $NAME$ ",

"(defonce $NAME$ ",

"(declare $NAME$ "

]

}

And then copy/paste this into your Syntax Specific User settings for Clojure (open a .clj file, then find that menu item under Preferences > Settings — More):

{

"extensions": ["cljs", "clj", "cljx"],

"word_separators": "./\\()\"':,.;~@%^&|+=[]{}`~"

}

That might not be a perfect list of characters that act as word separators in Clojure, but it has covered all the cases I've tried so far. Bind whatever keyboard shortcut you want to the "go_to_function" command, and then after positioning the caret over a function or var name, hit the shortcut. It will search through all of files in the navbar on the left (i.e. your project) for one of the above strings, replacing $NAME$ with the name of the symbol at the caret.

Obviously this won't search within your mavin jar files, so what I've done is simply extracted the source out of them for dependencies that I use and placed those files within my project in a folder that's ignored by git. Thus, "Find Function Definition" now works on just about every symbol I try it on! :-)

I might make a blog post about my ST2 Clojure setup if there's any interest in that.

4. On Sublime Text (ST)

--------------------------------

Non-free.

I'd say it's free for people who don't care about nag prompts. If you don't want to support the developer, you can use all the features for as long as you like at the cost of having to click "Cancel" at a nag prompt every so often.

Cheers!

Greg

--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.

[Cedric Greevey]

You submit patches to nonfree software?!

[Greg]

You submit patches to nonfree software?!

How do you make a screwy-eyed emoticon?

The plugin is free software. ST is nagware. Oh, and IntelliJ, as others have already pointed out, is also free software (community edition, which is great).

-Greg

--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.

[Greg]

BTW, if anyone here has decent Python experience and wants to try out Sublime for Clojure development, the plugin I linked to could really be improved by supporting regular expressions... :-)

--
Please do not email me anything that you are not comfortable also sharing with the NSA.

[Cedric Greevey]

Someone makes free software plugins for nonfree software?!

[Jeff Heon]

it happens all the time.

In a sense, it's not weirder than making free software for proprietary operating systems 8)

[Cedric Greevey]

Seems a bit more at risk from "the vendor goes kaput", though. It's far easier to imagine the vendor of Sublime Text going out of business than either Apple or Microsoft doing likewise.

Of course, none of what I said applies to plugins that adhere to a standard implemented by both free and nonfree hosts -- browser plugins that can work with both Firefox and IE, say.

--

[Colin Fleming]

Sure, it's not as weird as it sounds. Some of us would rather pay to have reliable tools, but still want to customise them. There are several free plugins for IntelliJ Ultimate, which as usual are people scratching their own itch. See also the people who spend a huge amount of time customising World of Warcraft and the like.

[Andrew Inggs]

On 25 July 2013 21:55, Lee Spector wrote:

For Sean or anyone who finds Sean's narrative compelling (I do), imagine emacs without the learning curve! I say it's possible and I point to the long-extinct FRED (Fred Resembles Emacs Deliberately) that was part of Macintosh Common Lisp as a proof of principle. I don't have the time or chops to develop such a thing, but if anyone here does then this would be a way to make the world a better place.

Have you heard of Deuce by Håkan Råberg?  He gave a talk on it at Skills Matter London.  It not usable yet, but it looks promising.

From the readme:

Deuce is a re-implementation of Emacs in Clojure. It's a port of the C core and re-compiles existing Emacs Lisp to Clojure. It uses the Lanterna library for text UI. The goal is to reach reasonable compatibility with GNU Emacs during 2013. The longer term goal is to phase out Emacs Lisp in favour for Clojure, to add a Web UI and re-capture Emacs' spirit on a contemporary platform.

Andrew

[Cedric Greevey]

Would that include a contemporary user interface that can show trees properly, do graphical diffs, and be quickly taken up by any reasonably adept Windows or Mac user the way Eclipse, clooj, and IntelliJ can?

--

[Niels van Klaveren]

Live-editing OpenGL under Quill (Processing) worked very well in CCW last time I toyed with it.

On Thursday, July 25, 2013 7:27:37 PM UTC+2, Chris Gill wrote:

I find this interesting. I've been using light table mostly, but recently I tried my hand at socket programming and light table flopped on this type of a project. I ended up using lein repl for most of my work which became a pain and now I'm looking at emacs with a slight kink in my lips. I'll have to try eclipse for clojure out, I've only ever done android in eclipse. Do you think something like an openGL project in clojure in eclipse with live-editing is a possibility? I've mostly seen this kind of stuff in emacs but I feel like it has less to do with emacs and more with nrepl and evaling..

-c

On Tuesday, January 29, 2013 1:40:33 PM UTC-5, Timo Mihaljov wrote:

On 29.01.2013 16:32, Jay Fields wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Feng Shen <she...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have programming Clojure for almost 2 years, for a living.
>>
>
> This is probably an important part of what answer the OP is looking
> for. When I was doing Clojure for about 10% of my job IntelliJ was
> fine. Now that it's 90% of my job, I wouldn't be able to give up emacs
> go back to IntelliJ.
>
> If you're just looking at Clojure as a hobby and you already know
> IntelliJ, I wouldn't recommend switching. However, if you're going to
> be programming Clojure almost all of the time, I think emacs is the
> superior choice.
>

For what it's worth, I switched from Emacs to Eclipse and
Counterclockwise for Clojure programming. Laurent's done an excellent
job with it, and I even prefer his take on paredit over Emacs's
original. I still use Emacs for everything else, but for Clojure I find
Counterclockwise to be "the superior choice".


--
Timo

[Charlie Griefer]

On Jul 25, 2013, at 12:37 PM, Sean Corfield <seanco...@gmail.com> wrote:

When I started doing Clojure, I used TextMate so it was an obvious
choice to try Sublime Text 2. I tried it on Mac, Windows, and Linux
and it drove me insane with its quirks, bugs, inconsistencies across
platforms and (at the time) very poor REPL integration. I know it's
gotten better but I just found it clunky and the workflow felt hacked
together. That said, three of my team love ST2.

As one of the three on the team, I'd like to clarify something regarding my love for ST2. I used it as my primary editor before really delving into Clojure, and yes, I thought it was fantastic. Lightweight, but not lacking on features. Everything that Eclipse, to me, was not.

Since getting into Clojure, I've been using Emacs. I can't really picture using any other editor/IDE for Clojure development. The learning curve was _much_ smaller than I had initially anticipated (feared, actually). I simply kept a cheat sheet open on my laptop whilst working on the desktop. Still learning, and probably will be for a while. But I am able to be productive while learning, so that's not too much of an issue.

As far as the original question, if it hasn't already been said in the thread… it depends. I know people who swear by IntelliJ and I know people who swear at IntelliJ. The same can be said for any IDE/editor. Asking if one is "good" is like asking if a particular flavor of ice cream is good. Which is silly, because that's highly subjective. Unless you're asking about butter brickle ice cream. I mean c'mon. Who doesn't like butter brickle ice cream?

--

Charlie Griefer

http://charlie.griefer.com

"Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself." 

-- Desiderius Erasmus

[Charlie Griefer]

On Jul 25, 2013, at 8:15 PM, Cedric Greevey <cgre...@gmail.com> wrote:

Someone makes free software plugins for nonfree software?!

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:04 PM, Greg <gr...@kinostudios.com> wrote:

You submit patches to nonfree software?!

I may regret asking this… but don't people deserve to get paid for their work? I mean if they choose to charge (I'm not putting down the free model at all)? 

And at $70 for ST 2, well as a developer I use an editor pretty frequently. I'm thinking that at $70, if I find the software helps me be productive, then it pretty much pays for itself some time during the first day.

[Timothy Baldridge]

+1 to Charlie. If I ever went back to Python development I would plop down whatever the going rate is for PyCharm (InteliJ Python IDE), that thing is an awesome piece of tech. There are very few times I've been utterly blown away by an idea all the standard features of Python (testing, debugging, code coverage, project structure, etc) are defaults in PyCharm. It even detects multiple versions of Python on your system and adds them to the intelisense and run menus. 

To be honest, I can't wait until we have something like that for Clojure. Give me a fast, light, InteliJ based IDE that "just works" 100% of the time, and I'd pay several hundred dollars for that software. 

Timothy

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--
“One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that–lacking zero–they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.”
(Robert Firth)

[Steven Degutis]

+1

[Lee Spector]

On Jul 26, 2013, at 3:02 AM, Andrew Inggs wrote:
> On 25 July 2013 21:55, Lee Spector wrote:
>> For Sean or anyone who finds Sean's narrative compelling (I do), imagine emacs without the learning curve! I say it's possible and I point to the long-extinct FRED (Fred Resembles Emacs Deliberately) that was part of Macintosh Common Lisp as a proof of principle. I don't have the time or chops to develop such a thing, but if anyone here does then this would be a way to make the world a better place.
>
> Have you heard of Deuce by Håkan Råberg? He gave a talk on it at Skills Matter London. It not usable yet, but it looks promising.

I hadn't and yes it looks interesting to me too, although it's only addressing part of what I'm suggesting (and what FRED did, in Common Lisp). It's about making emacs work on a Clojure/JVM foundation, and that's great, but the main reason I think that FRED was "emacs without the learning curve" has to do with its GUI.

FRED used totally normal and expected GUI conventions, which users would know from any other application on the platform (Mac OS), so that any new user could use it and access all of its main functionality without dealing with any exotic GUI concepts (e.g. hidden buffers in windows, key chords, etc.).

All of emacs's power was there, and it could be deployed with key chords etc. if you wanted to (and extended with Common Lisp). But most of the core functionality could also be deployed (and discovered!) through platform-normal GUI elements like separate windows and menus and dialogs (which didn't really exist when emacs was first developed; some of emacs's GUI conventions are good ideas, but many are just historical artifacts).

For example, in FRED standard dialogs were used for standard interactions (e.g. opening files) and new information would appear in new windows (could be tabs instead these days, I guess) rather than hiding a current buffer in a current window. You selected buffers by clicking on windows, just as you would in any other application. You could click on a function and use platform-obvious menus to get to the function's documentation or definition or a related namespace search ("apropos" in Common Lisp). Errors would produce a scrollable/clickable stack backtrace in a new window, which you could browse, click to see stack frames with local variable values, etc. You could select an expression in a Lisp buffer by double-clicking on one of its delimiters. Etc.

The key thing here is that all of that powerful emacs-like functionality was and could conceivably again be offered in a way that follows reasonably standard GUI conventions, so that new users basically know how to use it before they use it, and they can figure out more as they go along. They don't need cheat sheets or a taste for adventure. And they can install and use the system, with most of its most commonly used functions, without knowing anything exotic, and learn more as they go, discovering things via platform-standard GUI elements.

Several Clojure IDEs seem to be getting much better with respect to GUI/usability/learning curve issues, but my point was that there's no reason (in principle :-) that one couldn't build a Clojure programming environment that really is essentially emacs, with all of its power, but also really has essentially no learning curve. I know of some projects that have made it much easier to download/install emacs environments for Clojure, and there are also some versions of emacs out there with platform-natural menus, but I don't know of any projects dedicated to providing a complete emacs-based Clojure environment with the usability and lack of learning curve of FRED. And I do think this would be a beautiful thing to have in the community!

-Lee

[Lee Spector]

PS, I wrote:

> but I don't know of any projects dedicated to providing a complete emacs-based Clojure environment with the usability and lack of learning curve of FRED.

I *do* know about https://mclide.com and https://github.com/TerjeNorderhaug/mclide, and it's author Terje Norderhaug tells me that that project is "alive and well," but it's not clear to me where this is headed or with what momentum.

-Lee

[Cedric Greevey]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Charlie Griefer <charlie...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Jul 25, 2013, at 8:15 PM, Cedric Greevey <cgre...@gmail.com> wrote:

Someone makes free software plugins for nonfree software?!

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:04 PM, Greg <gr...@kinostudios.com> wrote:

You submit patches to nonfree software?!

I may regret asking this… but don't people deserve to get paid for their work?

There's a difference between "getting paid for your work" and "getting paid over and over again for work you did once, years ago". There's also a difference between "getting paid for your work" and "getting free improvements contributed to your code but not making your code, in turn, freely available to the community". And that's leaving aside the matter of the "free" in "(non)free software" being "free as in speech, not as in beer".

[Gary Trakhman]

Open-source developers are paid for their work in lots of ways that may/may-not involve cash.

Commercial devs and products are not necessarily evil, and can be good for the community.  

Who cares if software gets bought over and over again? That's the beauty of software!  Competition actually still drives improvement in this space (Jetbrains is not Microsoft).  

This is kind of like an open source version of the the software-piracy 'lost sale' argument, a 'lost contribution' argument.  Not every open-source plugin developer for a commercial product would have contributed to an open-source project instead.

[Andy Fingerhut]

There are many who agree with Richard Stallman that it is unethical to distribute software without the source code.

There are many who disagree with him, myself included.  I think it is 100% ethical to sell proprietary software, sans source code.

I only mention this in hopes that people interested in discussing the topic at length will find an appropriate forum to do so, which I hope the Clojure Google group is not.

Andy

[Cedric Greevey]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Gary Trakhman <gary.t...@gmail.com> wrote:

Open-source developers are paid for their work in lots of ways that may/may-not involve cash.

But generally they're paid as they work, and if they stop working, they stop getting paid, like in most jobs.

Of course, the actual coders of closed-source software like Windows also stop getting paid if they stop working; it's the big company that hired them that gets to keep raking it in without necessarily having to do any more work.

 

Commercial devs and products are not necessarily evil, and can be good for the community.  

Did I claim otherwise? I just thought it odd that people would make unpaid contributions to nonfree software. Seems kind of like donating money to Apple instead of to a local soup kitchen.

Who cares if software gets bought over and over again? That's the beauty of software!  Competition actually still drives improvement in this space (Jetbrains is not Microsoft).  

This is kind of like an open source version of the the software-piracy 'lost sale' argument, a 'lost contribution' argument.  Not every open-source plugin developer for a commercial product would have contributed to an open-source project instead.

I don't think I claimed that either. On the other hand, one can make an argument that the plugin developer may be being taken advantage of, if they are essentially improving a *commercial* product (and only a commercial product, rather than a wide, interoperable array of both commercial and free products) gratis.

[Mark]

On Friday, July 26, 2013 2:23:33 PM UTC-5, Andy Fingerhut wrote:

There are many who agree with Richard Stallman that it is unethical to distribute software without the source code.

And there are many who think it's unethical to have a philosophy that it's unethical to distribute software without the source code.

...back to the topic.  Isn't one of the problems with Eclipse and Intellij that you can't script the IDEs with clojure like you can "script" Emacs with elisp?  I think Eclipse had some kind of scripting environment at one time, but haven't read much about it in recent years. Isn't Eclipse really hard to write plugins for anyway as opposed to Intellij.  I have no experience with either, but have read that the Scala IDE developers have had to fight various aspects of the Eclipse architecture to get things working 

[Andrew Inggs]

On 26 July 2013 09:53, Cedric Greevey wrote:

Would that include a contemporary user interface that can show trees properly, do graphical diffs, and be quickly taken up by any reasonably adept Windows or Mac user the way Eclipse, clooj, and IntelliJ can?

I don't speak for Håkan, but I don't think that's an explicit goal of the project.  On the other hand, being in Clojure, I think it could be taken it in that direction and I'm sure it would be easier than starting from the Emacs C source.

[Cedric Greevey]

On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 5:47 AM, Mark <MarkHa...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, July 26, 2013 2:23:33 PM UTC-5, Andy Fingerhut wrote:

There are many who agree with Richard Stallman that it is unethical to distribute software without the source code.

And there are many who think it's unethical to have a philosophy that it's unethical to distribute software without the source code.

And there are many who think it's unethical to consider merely having a philosophy to be, in and of itself, unethical ... including everyone who signed the Bill of Rights.

[Mark]

Ok,  then you consider Stallman's philosophy unethical since it considers the philosophy of distributing close-source unethical.    You should probably understand Stallman's position on other things and how he's behaved in regards to other projects (glibc, GCC, Gnome) to really understand his position.  Hint, it's just as much about Stallman, as it is about any concern he has about "defending users rights".

[Cedric Greevey]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Mark <MarkHa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok,  then you consider Stallman's philosophy unethical since it considers the philosophy of distributing close-source unethical.

No, that would only be if he considered it unethical for someone to disagree with him, rather than unethical for someone to distribute closed source software.

 

   You should probably understand Stallman's position

This from someone on the same side that called Stallman, who appears to be a right-libertarian, a "socialist"?!

[Matt Hoffman]

To be honest, I can't wait until we have something like that for Clojure. Give me a fast, light, InteliJ based IDE that "just works" 100% of the time, and I'd pay several hundred dollars for that software. 

+1 to this. 

I've used IntelliJ for years for Java, Javascript, HTML, SQL, ... development. I've tried Eclipse about once a year for the last several years, but I still prefer IntelliJ. A lot of that is personal preference and what I'm used to. 

But for Clojure development, I find that I prefer Emacs if I'm doing only doing Clojure development and Intellij for mixed Java/Clojure development. I still really like IntelliJ as an editor, but prefer Emacs for Clojure. I also look forward to the day when I'll be able to use one tool for both.

I didn't know Emacs before starting Clojure, and the learning curve is definitely steep, but I'm familiar with Vim, so Emacs + Evil mode has made it a lot easier.  

Here's some Emacs-like things in IntelliJ that I like (and Emacs users may not know about):  

- IntelliJ's interface can be scaled back to look like a text editor (see http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IntelliJIDEA/User+Interface). Very clean and uncluttered.

  -  it now has a dark theme now, which I prefer. Minor thing, but being able to customize the UI is one of those small things that makes a small but ongoing difference. 

- It has a key sequence that opens up a "run this action by name" much like Emacs' M-x. I use that a lot. 

- Keybindings are infinitely customizable. 

And unlike Emacs, it's Java integration is first-rate.

Here's some things in Emacs that I wish IntelliJ had: 

- IntelliJ's has only a very loose approximation of paredit. Emacs is miles ahead. 

- IntelliJ's REPL cannot connect to a running nrepl server, which is a huge pain for me. There are some branches of the La Clojure plugins that look like they may address this, but they haven't had a release for a while now.  Definitely not CCW levels of activity (Larent, are you sure you don't want to work on IntelliJ? :) ) .  

- Emacs is obviously far better over a remote connection of any kind, since it's fundamentally text-based and works over an SSH connection. IntelliJ doesn't even work well over a VNC/NX connection because of how it redraws the screen (although there are some settings that may help with this). And since IntelliJ's REPL can't connect to a remote nrepl server, you're out of luck when working with a remote machine. 

    - That makes pairing with Emacs much easier, if both people happen to know Emacs.

- Emacs gives the impression of being easier to customize. 

    - that's *mostly* an intangible thing -- I don't know elisp well enough to write much, but I know where to start if I wanted to. And as Phil said, it's "low friction."  

IntelliJ plugins, on the other hand, have a much higher barrier to entry, so if I want behavior that doesn't happen to be available via a checkbox I'm less likely to try adding it. Now, if IntelliJ's Clojure plugin had a Clojure interface into its runtime, so that I could make changes via a REPL, I think that'd be a killer feature...

I keep saying I'll try Eclipse again, since it has *much* better Clojure support than IntelliJ (thanks to Laurent) and it's still a decent Java environment, but I haven't tried it in a while. Certainly not since the Kepler release. I'm going to check out Laurent's link above.

- matt

[Laurent PETIT]

2013/7/28 Matt Hoffman <ma...@mhoffman.org>:

Hey, I've considered it in the past, for sure, and honestly even
recently, 2-3 months back.
But the fact is that now Colin has unveiled the premises of a good
follow-up of La Clojure, so there may be no need for that anymore ;-)
(and honestly, I couldn't work on both project given the time I can
devote to it right now - I wish I could ! - )

>
> - Emacs is obviously far better over a remote connection of any kind, since
> it's fundamentally text-based and works over an SSH connection. IntelliJ
> doesn't even work well over a VNC/NX connection because of how it redraws
> the screen (although there are some settings that may help with this). And
> since IntelliJ's REPL can't connect to a remote nrepl server, you're out of
> luck when working with a remote machine.
>
> - That makes pairing with Emacs much easier, if both people happen to
> know Emacs.
>
> - Emacs gives the impression of being easier to customize.
>
> - that's *mostly* an intangible thing -- I don't know elisp well enough
> to write much, but I know where to start if I wanted to. And as Phil said,
> it's "low friction."
>
> IntelliJ plugins, on the other hand, have a much higher barrier to entry, so
> if I want behavior that doesn't happen to be available via a checkbox I'm
> less likely to try adding it. Now, if IntelliJ's Clojure plugin had a
> Clojure interface into its runtime, so that I could make changes via a REPL,
> I think that'd be a killer feature...

That's also something I've started working on on "spare time". But
since Eclipse is still "absorbing" the move from the 3.x branch to the
4.x branch, I was letting some time for things to stabilize, and will
focus my efforts on the 4.x branch when it's more widely adopted, and
current works on the editor then finishing work on Leiningen 2 full
integration are done.

>
>
> I keep saying I'll try Eclipse again, since it has *much* better Clojure
> support than IntelliJ (thanks to Laurent) and it's still a decent Java
> environment, but I haven't tried it in a while. Certainly not since the
> Kepler release. I'm going to check out Laurent's link above.

I will release tonight a new beta version with support for "fix
indentation as you type" (e.g. when you move a form from column A to
column B, the dependent lines will follow, with the same column delta,
thus preserving manual indentation - think cond-like forms manual
indentation).

[Mark]

On Sunday, July 28, 2013 6:52:37 AM UTC-5, Cedric Greevey wrote:

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Mark <MarkHa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok,  then you consider Stallman's philosophy unethical since it considers the philosophy of distributing close-source unethical.

No, that would only be if he considered it unethical for someone to disagree with him, rather than unethical for someone to distribute closed source software.

Stallman considers anybody that distributes closed-source software unethical.  There's no way to spin away from that fact.   

I always love this quote by Stallman:

"Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a “free” version of that program?

It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it)."

http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/21/gnu-gplv3-linux-cz_dl_0321stallman2.html

So Stallman spins "freeing code" with freeing slaves.  Obviously the guy has some ethical problems of his own.

[Ben Wolfson]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Mark <MarkHa...@gmail.com> wrote:

So Stallman spins "freeing code" with freeing slaves.  Obviously the guy has some ethical problems of his own.

The claim that freeing something wrongly held isn't theft (in a moral rather than legal sense), though the wrongful holder would call it theft, isn't clearly problematic. You may think that Stallman is wrong that code can be wrongly held, but that's independent of the analogies he draws.

--
Ben Wolfson
"Human kind has used its intelligence to vary the flavour of drinks, which may be sweet, aromatic, fermented or spirit-based. ... Family and social life also offer numerous other occasions to consume drinks for pleasure." [Larousse, "Drink" entry]

[Cedric Greevey]

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Mark <MarkHa...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sunday, July 28, 2013 6:52:37 AM UTC-5, Cedric Greevey wrote:

On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:28 AM, Mark <MarkHa...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok,  then you consider Stallman's philosophy unethical since it considers the philosophy of distributing close-source unethical.

No, that would only be if he considered it unethical for someone to disagree with him, rather than unethical for someone to distribute closed source software.

Stallman considers anybody that distributes closed-source software unethical.  There's no way to spin away from that fact.

And that's exactly what I said. I don't think Stallman considers "disagreeing with Stallman" to be unethical, though.

[Mike]

On a related note (If I need to post this elsewhere, just let me know):

What do people use for ClojureCLR development?  If I ever get started, this is where I will need to be working.