Cursive, an IDE for Clojure and ClojureScript, has reached 1.0 | Hacker News Reader

Cursive, an IDE for Clojure and ClojureScript, has reached 1.0

cursive-ide.com

192 pointslemming50 comments

After Emacs/Cider/whatever crashed/locked up on me for the 20th time I finally gave up and moved to Cursive over a year ago. I've never looked back, it's fast, does what I need it to, and I still discover features all the time (like the clojure.test integration!). It's also a fantastic way to get new programmers into Clojure. No need to download lein, or dozens of packages or learn a text based editor. Just install InteliJ and install a single plugin.

Great work.

And the debugging support. Good. Debugging. Support!

This really cannot be repeated enough times.

After 2 years without it you go back in and it's so seductive you almost want to stop writing unit tests.

Ignore this feeling even as you bask in it! :D

Any tips on using it? Breakpoints in the chrome dev tools and `debugger` are a huge part of my JS workflow, but I've been having trouble wrapping my head around the InteliJ UI. I basically just want to be able to pause the program, see/move up the call stack, and use the REPL with local variables.

You just click in the gutter to create a breakpoint and start a debug REPL - look at the IntelliJ Run menu.

let's not forget crazy stuff like going into debug mode and then evaling random clojure code in the context of the debugger

Best of all is "stop when this exception is thrown". I use that to start 90% of my investigations.

This post is enough for me to decide to get this NOW.

If you're interested in the debugger, I spoke about it at Clojure/West this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql77RwhcCK0. It shows how the debugger works and I talk about the problems debugging Clojure code, of which there are many.

I'm having a very good experience with cider/emacs lately. version 10 has breakpoints and stepping, code reload... it's working pretty smoothly for me now, both osx and linux.

I tried cursive a week ago and I only got breakpoints working once. I'm not used to intellij so that might be my fault, but I couldn't make it work so after an hour or so I just went back to emacs. I'm really a vim person at heart, but for clojure, emacs seems to fit the best. Well not emacs really, but the ecosystem.

I usually use vim for everything, but really checked out Light Table more recently. I wasn't able to tell from any of the demos, but does Cursive offer something like the Instarepl feature of Light Table? I see you can send commands from the cursor to the repl, but there's something magical about the Instarepl that I think is hard to beat.

do people actually use LT instarepl for anything but teaching? Side effects in our code are killer, and real world clojure code is, you know, pretty close to referentially transparent but not quite...

I use it instead of a repl, to be frank it used to be a pain but it's quite transparent now.

Ctrl+enter your ns declaration gives you an instarepl in your project/file

It doesn't right now, sadly. IntelliJ is now capable of painting results inline in the editor but I haven't added that for REPL eval yet since results can only be on a single line. I'm discussing this with JetBrains, I'd hoped a fix would make it into v15 but it didn't in the end. Soon, with a bit of luck.

This will only be inline results though, not a full auto-execute instarepl.

Cursive is an excellent way to write Clojure and has improved my workflow tremendously. Highly recommended; I bought a license. Congratulations to Colin on a 1.0 release.

Colin has done an incredible job on Cursive. It takes full advantage of the infrastructure provided by IntelliJ to do things like where used, and refactoring. I've been a happy Cursive user for 18 months and now I'm a happy Cursive customer.

Great REPL, actual debugger, and all the nice IDEA features available to other languages. This is definitely my favorite way of writing Clojure by far.

I recently tried cursive... it just didn't work right. Breakpoints didn't actually stop, no stepping. It was supposed to do that, it just didn't work.

I gave up, upgraded my copy of cider, and noticed it supports breakpoints and whatnot now. Since I'm used to emacs anyway, that works for me.

I'd have been happy to give cursive a whirl for a while but I couldn't make even the most basic debugging work right, and that was the only reason I even considered trying it.

I've just started using it this week (Monday, actually) but breakpoints have worked fine for me. Maybe you should give it another shot?

That's pretty unusual, debugging for the most part just works. If you want help investigating that let me know, but if you're happy with Emacs that's cool too - lots of good options for Clojure.

I'm a bit surprised that 1.0 came before macro-awareness (i.e., knowing that symbols emanating from macros aren't "undefined").

It really only rears its ugly head with user-defined macros that define locals/vars. Thankfully this sort of thing is pretty rare, and when I do use them I get some extra highlighting, so it's not a big deal.

Yeah, this is the biggest hole in Cursive's functionality right now. It doesn't affect most people much but it's still painful for some, depending on which libraries you're using. Fixing this is my #1 priority in terms of large features.

This is also by far my #1 wanted feature. Otherwise, fantastic job!

I've been using this awhile and will definitely buy a license. Congratulations on the release!

Nice work! I'm a long-time emacs user who thought that emacs was the best way to write clojure code. I was really happy with emacs as a clojure dev environment but after trying cursive recently it's now my preferred environment for writing clojure.

What made you switch? I mean, if you are already familiar with Emacs, I don't see any reason to switch. CIDER and clj-refactor offer a lot more functionality, and the debugger is fantastic.

When I was using emacs, I would spend a good chunk of time maintaining my editor, not coding. Cursive Just Works, and as a consultant it means I can put my full time into client work.

Awesome! This means a lot for Clojure traction. The reality is that a lot of Clojure new arrivals are going to be still doing straight Java and this provides a nice blended experience. Hence, this is a profound contribution to adoption.

I somehow missed the pre-order offer here but I've been using Cursive for the odd project here and there and it fits perfectly. Love the product and look forward to buying it soon. Thoroughly worth it.

Congratulations! I've found Cursive to be very easy and pleasant to use throughout its development and look forward to now contributing to its development through a license purchase.

We finally have an IDE for Clojure... my god. I remember seeing Colin demo Cursive at the Conj last year; my emacs got sad.

Just tried vim-fireplace and its working good for evaluating things. Anyone has more experience using it?. I'm gonna check Cursive although I really like vim so I don't know if I'll get used to it.

IdeaVIM provides reasonably good vim emulation. You'll probably get annoyed by something (I have yet to find a vim emulator I think is as good as Vim itself) but I only had to make a few minor changes in my vim patterns to get it working.

evil is the best vim outside of vim.

It's about the same but everybody uses vim a bit differently so YMMV. I switched from emacs+evil to cursive+ideavim. My annoyance with evil is that `xp` doesn't work, my annoyance with ideavim is that the `{` text object is scope based instead of text based. I've had Esc not work correctly under some circumstances in both (I use c-[ instead) and neither supports iskeyword so * doesn't search for identifier in skewer-case languages.

If by `xp` you transposing chars, it does work in evil.

I find it hard to see how anything could claim to be vi/vim-like and not have "xp" cut-letter-paste-letter-after (ie: transpose letters)? I suppose some might work for "dlp", but not "xp" -- but it sounds like a strange omission?

My only issue with the intelliJ editor is that I can't traverse the file-manager with "hjkl". And that defeats the purpose for me.

I have been using cursive for the better part of 18 months. It's fantastic. My .emacs file's creation date is 2/10/1999, but I wouldn't imagine using anything but lein+idea+cursive.

Congratulations! Hope too see Cursive mature and grow with clojure language

This might be answered somewhere in their blog but why build an IDE on top of IntelliJ instead of just making a plugin for it? Is this so they can charge licensing?

It is a plugin.

Ah, my mistake. I read their home page and thought they took an Android Studio approach.

No, it's currently just a plugin. I am planning to make a standalone PyCharm-style IDE so it's easier to install for people unfamiliar with Java, but that didn't make it in time for the 1.0, sadly. It's quite a bit of work but still less than something like Android Studio - it's pretty much the community edition of IntelliJ shipped with Cursive installed and sane defaults for Clojure.

What ClojureScript-specific features does Cursive offer?

Since Cursive works by analysing source code, for the most part everything that works for Clojure just works for CLJS too - navigation, refactorings etc. I'm planning to add very soon native support for CLJS REPLs, since getting them running can be pretty fiddly. And mid-term I'm planning a CLJS debugger with integrated REPL. That would also allow debugging CLJS in Electron shells or on devices when using React Native.

Can a browser REPL-connected Cursive auto-complete based on the browser environment?

Not based on the live browser environment over the connection, no. Currently the completion for CLJS REPLs comes from the current project, and Cursive uses the Tern static files to autocomplete basic things that are normally present. I'm planning to improve this, but that's the state of play right now.

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