Cursive Clojure: A Clojure IntelliJ plugin | Better HN

Cursive Clojure: A Clojure IntelliJ plugin | Better HN

60 comments

lemming12y ago

Developer here - I'm happy to answer any questions folk might have!

hendekagon12y ago

Just installed it...very happy to see structural editing! Aaand immediately I want more features! Can we have a feature to allow any function (that follows some specification) to be bound to a key so that it can be applied to the selected expression ? This would allow for functional editing or even editing based on core.logic and core.match. Also can we have function application graphs (which functions use which other functions) ? BTW I will gladly pay/donate for/to your work - nice one!

lemming12y ago

Hmm, the functional editing idea is interesting - can you drop me an email at the address on the webpage to discuss? I'd like to know what you have in mind for that. Function application graphs would be great too, and could be built off the resolution functionality.

dljsjr12y ago

How does this compare to the official JetBrains plugin, La Clojure?

lemming12y ago

Cursive is based off a fork of La Clojure from a long time ago. Since then I've rewritten 80% of the code in Clojure and added a lot of new functionality and fixed a lot of bugs. There's lots of new stuff in there, but the main highlights are Paredit-style structural editing and good nREPL integration (for local and remote REPLs). Jan Thomä also kindly let me bundle the leiningen plugin so that's provided out of the box and I'll be making a lot of improvements to that over the next couple of weeks. All the beta testers have said it's a great improvement over La Clojure. Unfortunately La Clojure has never been a priority for JetBrains, which is what let me to start work on this a while back.

I'm planning to release this as a commercial PyCharm-style IDE, at a similar price point. I've done this in consultation with JetBrains, in case anyone's concerned about that.

Edit: some clarification.

sesm12y ago

As far as I understand, Cursive will be available both as a plugin and as a standalone IDE, right? What will be the added value of standalone IDE? PyCharm is a subset of IDEA Ultimate + Python plugin, will it be the case with Cursive? In other words, does it make sense to buy Cursive IDE for users who already have IDEA Ultimate?

olenhad12y ago

Do you have a rainbow-parens mode? I've become overdependent on those in emacs.

lemming12y ago

Sure do - Settings->Clojure->Rainbow Parens. You can't customise the colours right now, but that's coming in the next drop.

hansgru12y ago

There are many (important IMO) feature requests for LaClojure in the Issue tracker. Any plans to implement at least some of those?

lemming12y ago

A lot of these are fixed in Cursive - anything in particular you're after?

hansgru12y ago

#CLJ-183, #CLJ-188, #CLJ-186, #CLJ-178, #CLJ-165, #CLJ-129, #CLJ-77 to mention just a few.

Kototama12y ago

How is "renaming of symbols" done? Did you write your own Clojure parser?

lemming12y ago

Right, this is one of the great things about the IntelliJ platform products - the IDE actually parses the program and creates an AST. This allows support for all the magic like refactorings and so forth, including rename. Basically I implement symbol resolution and rename mostly just magically works. Unfortunately due to macros in Clojure symbol resolution is far from trivial.

DigitalJack12y ago

What license will this be released under?

lemming12y ago

This will be commercial, similar to PyCharm, RubyMine and the other JetBrains IDEs. I'm considering a slightly restricted free edition that can't be used for commercial work, but I haven't worked out the details yet. It almost certainly won't be fully open source, but I'm considering having a small closed source core and then the majority of the Clojure implementation being open source and extensible. This will need some thought and probably won't happen right away though. In the short term it'll be closed source commercial.

aerlinger12y ago

Any chance you will roll this out to other JetBrains IDEs (RubyMine, Webstorm, PyCharm, etc...)?

lemming12y ago

Yes, this is not something that I've investigated but it's definitely doable if there's demand.

Terretta12y ago

No questions yet but we'll be trying this. Thrilled to see more tooling for this language.

lemming12y ago

Great! Hope you enjoy it, I'd love to know what you think and what you'd like to see in it.

pron12y ago

How do I choose the lein profile? How can I add a lein plugin task (like midge) to?

lemming12y ago

There's still some lein functionality I need to add. Currently the best way to add a non-standard task like lein midje is to create a run config (Run->Edit Configurations..., hit + and select Leiningen). I'm going to be improving this soon - I assume you'd want to see those in the Lein toolwindow? Drop me an email if that doesn't do what you need it to.

pron12y ago

> I assume you'd want to see those in the Lein toolwindow?

Exactly.

Good plugin BTW. I like the jump to Java code (I work on a mixed Java/Clojure project), and was very happy to find out that renaming a Java method fixed the Clojure calls, too. And find usages works across languages! Keep up the good work!

EDIT: One problem I've found: If a function is defined not with defn but using a macro that expands to defn, then the symbol is not resolved.

EDIT 2: Just checked: refactoring and find usages works with Kotlin code, too (in a mixed Clojure/Java/Kotlin project).

cantelo12y ago

Just having a look at Cursive now, nice work! How do I enable and use the symbolic debugger?

TIA

lemming12y ago

I added some instructions for debugging REPL sessions to http://cursiveclojure.com/quickstart.html - it's clunky right now but I'll be fixing that soon.

lemming12y ago

You should be able to run any script in Debug mode (Run->Debug instead of Run->Run) and you can also debug your REPL session, although this is very clunky right now. I'll get some documentation up and provide a link here.

treerex12y ago

I'd be interested in seeing some screen shots to get a feel for its integration and new features.

lemming12y ago

I'll be looking to get those up ASAP - the cat got out of the bag a little sooner than I expected!

systems12y ago

I installed this, but I cant figure out how to create a new clojure project?

why isn't there a clojure option in the new project menu, like, groovy for example?

lemming12y ago

I added a (very) quick start guide here: http://cursiveclojure.com/quickstart.html. I'll get something prettier/better up ASAP.

lemming12y ago

Sorry, I need to get a quick start page up. Just create a new Java project, and it'll prompt you at the end to add Clojure to it.

warcher12y ago

Do you have a mailing list or something so I can get development news? Cause I'm interested in hearing how this develops, the website is a little sparse still, and I absolutely will not remember to come back in a month, haha.

lemming12y ago

I'm definitely planning to get a mailing list set up, I was caught slightly on the hop by the unexpected public release! I'll set something up ASAP.

edem12y ago

Why not Eclipse? 65% of java developers use it. Only 9% uses IntelliJ. Just asking.

lemming12y ago

For a couple of reasons. One is that there's already a great Clojure environment for Eclipse - Counterclockwise. Secondly, I think that IntelliJ provides a better platform for building something like this - it's just a better IDE all round in my opinion, and it's a great infrastructure to build on.

I suspect that you'd probably find that the percentage of Java devs using IntelliJ has gone up a lot in recent years too, their market share and mindshare has increased massively recently. I'm not aware of any stats though (and I'm not sure how accurate they would be if there were). Google recently switched from Eclipse to IntelliJ for the official Android development environment, for whatever that's worth.

lemming12y ago

BTW someone mentioned below the lack of a mailing list - if anyone would like to be updated about new releases drop me a line on cursive@cursiveclojure.com and I'll keep you up to date.

mjt022912y ago

This looks great at first glance. Thanks for all your hard work!

mb0213412y ago

Will Cursive be providing a strict paredit mode?

lemming12y ago

Yes, that's already about 80% there. There are some of the paredit commands missing but it's very usable right now. The most obvious omissions are open-round-and-newline, wrap-round and kill-word. Most other commands are there, and it's strict in the sense of preserving braces with backspace/delete.

timothyklim12y ago

ugh, if someone will make plugin for haskell — it will be amazing. I'm so glad for clojure community.

kul_12y ago

can it be integrated with vim?

AndreasFrom12y ago

I often hear good things about IdeaVim. I don't think that's want you meant, but I just wanted to throw it in there.

vutekst12y ago

I use IdeaVim every day for java work. It's okay, but it's a pretty shallow emulation, and I frequently miss things from real vim.

lemming12y ago

If you're interested in whether the Cursive functionality can be integrated into Vim, the answer is no - it relies on a lot of the functionality of the IntelliJ platform. As AndreasFrom mentioned, the IdeaVim bindings are meant to be really good, but I don't use them myself.

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