Choosing an IDE / Editor for Clojure Coding

Question

I am looking for an editor or IDE for my Clojure coding, and I found this thread:
Clojure Editor / IDE Guidelines for Mac OS X

However, I have a couple of questions:
Which IDE offers the best Clojure environment (right now): IntelliJ, Eclipse, or NetBeans?
What are the benefits of Aquamacs (I read what Rick uses) over previous heavy IDEs?

Answer 1

I spent significant chunks of time (on Mac):

• Textmate w / Clojure bundle
• Netbeans enclojure
• Eclipse ccw
• Emacs.app (not Aquamacs)

My opinion about them:

Textmate is a great way to get started, and obviously a very functional text editing environment. At some point, I would like to improve REPL integration.

NetBeans - Not wanting to learn Emacs, I switched to NetBeans. NetBeans Editor is OK. I found integration with building tools for things like Maven was rocky. NetBeans remote response is very good.

Emacs - I eventually bit the bullet and recognized Emacs. Editing with paredit is truly god-like. The REPL integration is great as you expected. clojure -test-mode is very convenient. But this is Emacs with all its pros and cons. If you intend to use Emacs on a Mac, I would recommend using Emacs.app rather than Aquamacs. Aquamacs does not comply with the standard gnu emacs conventions and it will be more difficult for you to create a portable environment or use other people's extensions. Right now I'm using Emacs for daily editing and a normal work environment.

Eclipse - The Eclipse editor is coming, and in structural editing there are some of the subtleties of paredit (but not truly significant features of slurp, barf, splice). Eclipse repl is just a command line replacement, and it's pretty bad compared to NetBeans. However, the remote NetBeans replica has been hacked into an independent project and will soon approach Eclipse, which will make Eclipse even more attractive. Maven integration is very good. I use Eclipse now when I want to see many files and projects at once, which is not easy for me to do in Emacs.

At the moment, my bet is that the Eclipse tool will begin to move away from others. But I still hope that a clojure-specific IDE will appear. :)

UPDATE March 10, 2014:

The world has changed a lot since I first wrote this. There are currently at least 6 very good Clojure environments.

If you don’t have fidelity to an existing editor and want to start easy, there are two great options:

1) Nightcode is all you basically need to write and run Clojure in a new editor written in Clojure. It is actually easy to set up and just get started.

2) Light Table - LT is written in ClojureScript, but I would say that it has more ambitious goals to change the way we write code, it is more interactive, and our data is more visible. Very active plugin scene.

If you are a Java programmer from the IDE world or feel that IDE support might be useful to you, check out:

3) IntelliJ Cursive - this restart of the IntelliJ Clojure environment quickly wins the converts. A great toolkit for Clojure, and it gets even faster.

4) Eclipse counterclockwise - CCW has been running for many years and continues to record the start of work and the ease of use of rough edges. If you are already an Eclipse user, you will feel at home.

If you are a keyboard hacker, both of them have a great environment:

5) Emacs with CIDER - Emacs is more a lifestyle than an editor, and for a long time was the only editor who could handle the professional level requirements for Clojure. If you do not already know Emacs, it is difficult to learn both Emacs and Clojure at the same time. The all-in-one environment that I saw as the most recommended is Prelude and Emacs Live .

6) Vim with Fireplace - Vim went through a couple of stages, but Fireplace is the place where he - a lot of people successfully with him.

Answer 2

I used both vim, emacs and Intellij. Of the three, I am most productive in emacs.

Before writing Clojure, I used vim for four years (and before that emacs for three) and considered myself one of the best other developers I knew about vim performance. As a result, I started using it for Clojure. I found it painful. I used vimclojure and only vimclojure. About a month after I switched to emacs, I came across this post. If I read that before switching to emacs, I could see that I was enjoying this setting.

Since then, I switched to emacs and fully believe that the learning curve is worth it, but it is not for everyone.

Answer 3

I use MacVim with VimClojure and am happy with it. But I'm a little biased ...

Answer 4

I really like jEdit , which is a pretty versatile text editor for programmers. It has syntax highlighting and Clojure REPL, available as a plugin.

Answer 5

I was recommended:

• Nightcode
• Color chart

Answer 6

Clojure development works very well with Emacs if you add some packages. I could recommend you some of these repositories:

https://github.com/bendisposto/emacs.d

Or, if you have a keyboard layout on your Mac, you can use my configuration:

https://github.com/n2o/emacs.d

Copy the repo to the ~/.emacs.d and run emacs. First, it loads and initializes the plugins, and then you have a ready-for-clojure configuration for emacs.

To run REPL, simply use:

 Mx cider-jack-in 

These configurations from the repositories are all from this concept:

https://gist.github.com/rkneufeld/5126926

Here you can see most of the keyboard shortcuts.

Answer 7

Sublime Text with Paredit and SublimeREPL is a good option.

Sublime Text is a powerful and lightweight editor. He uses a large plug-in umbrella.

Answer 8

Agree with Alex. I tried NetBeans, Emacs, Textmate, and Eclipse on OSX. Eclipse is currently the best choice. By the way, it also depends on your background. If you are a Java programmer, Eclipse is a very good choice. Sometimes I use REPL - for example, to try out Clojure 1.3 Alpha3. We need a Clojure-specific IDE; something like Komodo.

Answer 9

There is a new Clojure plugin for Intellij called Cursive .

Unfortunately, it seems that La Clojure and Leiningen plugins no longer support and do not work well on Intellij 12 and 13.

Answer 10

According to Clojure for the Brave and True, emacs is the best editor for clojure. Make sure you can get emacs.app for mac.

According to the author:
"The reason I recommend Emacs is because it offers tight integration with clojure REPL, which allows you to instantly try your code while writing. This closed loop feedback will be useful when learning clojure and writing real clojure programs. Emacs is also great for working with any Lisp dialect; in fact, Emacs is written in a Lisp dialect called Emacs Lisp (elisp). " Http://www.braveclojure.com/basic-emacs/

Answer 11

Eclipse is best that plugins are simply well integrated. I would recommend Nightcode on the side just because it was written in Clojure. I would not touch Emacs with a fifty-foot pole, I'm just not that hardcore.

Answer 12

VS Code does this for me on the Linux platform. I look at the Light Table and look a lot like VS Code, I believe I built the same engine. Go with an IDE that is closest to what you are already familiar with will be my decision. If you're used to the JetBrains IDE, then Cursive - check out the license terms, though.

Answer 13

I would also suggest looking at another IntelliJ Idea plugin "Clojure -Kit". It is younger than Cursive Clojure, but it can already provide all the features you need.

It is already in the JetBrains plugin repository. Or you can build it from sources (see https://github.com/gregsh/Clojure-Kit )