Clojure + Emacs | Hacker News Reader

Clojure + Emacs

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50 pointskyleburton11 comments

This is great timing for me. I sat down a few nights ago with the intention of learning Clojure, but ended up spending the whole evening wrestling with Emacs and SLIME, trying and failing to get a usable REPL. Perhaps I should have given up and just used the REPL in a terminal window, but I already know from my Common Lisp tinkering how useful it is to have SLIME.

On my adventures I found plenty of blog posts like this one, but none of them very recent, and I couldn't get any of them to work. Hopefully I'll have better luck this time, with a guide matching the current state of Clojure's distribution.

I used Emacs Starter Kit (http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit) and it set everything up for me in seconds.

I should add that I'm using Aquamacs, and avoided the Emacs Starter Kit due to the following note on the page you linked:

"Some have reported getting it to work with Aquamacs. However, since Aquamacs is not portable, it's difficult to test in it, and breakage is common."

I've been using it with Aquamacs without difficulty, for whatever it's worth.

I have some instructions that work equally for Carbon Emacs or Aquamacs here, http://www.formconstant.net/diagrams/?p=54.

Setting up Clojure on OS X is really easy now.

I think these days the easiest way to getting a working Clojure+SLIME setup is to use ELPA.

By far. And use leiningen swank to configure the classpath for your REPL when working on a project.

http://wiki.github.com/technomancy/leiningen/emacs-integrati...

Emacs Starter Kit includes ELPA and a bunch packages from there: it is precisely just a starter kit with some setup made for you and some "skeleton" for your .emacs.d.

So, if you already have your Emacs and ELPA setup, it's easier to just install a couple packages, but if you are starting from scratch with Emacs (as I was), the starter kit is better.

My .emacs is based on the emacs-starter-kit as well, its really helpful to hit the ground running if you do not have a configured emacs yet.

The built-in Lisp mode for editing and the inferior-lisp mode REPL give you 80 percent of SLIME without the installation pain.

With M-x swank-clojure-project, you don't have to slime-connect, just provide a project path.

http://github.com/technomancy/swank-clojure

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