SLIME for TextMate (sorta, Clojure) | Hacker News Reader

SLIME for TextMate (sorta, Clojure)

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37 pointsswannodette10 comments

That's really neat. Bravo!

I've hit a roadblock in my attempt to install the proper Clojure SLIME environment in Emacs. I've got clojure-mode, SLIME, swank-clojure, and leiningen installed, and I get as far as the slime-repl showing up properly, but my Clojure forms seemingly get ignored by the swank-clojure process. It's frustrating. From my readings of various Google Groups, people often seem to have trouble getting this whole machinery up and running. While the developers have done their best to set up ways to install the whole shebang automatically, that tends to make it more difficult for those of us who like to download systems piece by piece and put it together ourselves.

For that reason, a new way to interact with Clojure excites me. However, I may not take the leap of installing this project immediately. The main thing I like about the SLIME environment is that you get the full power of your text editor even in the REPL, which is invaluable for playing around with complex forms. With this system, it seems that you can either evaluate expressions in Textmate (which is not a REPL and forces you to context-switch to another window) or connect to cake in a terminal (which doesn't give you the flexibility of a text editor).

Perhaps a special Textmate buffer that automatically pastes the output of the eval'd form after the cursor would give me what I want. I will clone the project repo and start looking into what I can do. Thanks for the work you've done.

Thanks for the feedback! Feel free to fork and try things out. I think you'll find that the project is quite small and manageable and each command is pretty self contained. We would love to hear about alternate interaction models.

One exciting possibility is nREPL, http://github.com/cemerick/nREPL. Since WebKit now supports WebSockets I have a feeling we could add many interesting behaviors into the Bundle w/o descending into Objective-C.

Acknowledgements:

  Aria Haghighi, did much of the heavy lifting on this project!
  Stephen Roller, created the first version of the bundle in 2008
  Mark McGranaghan, expanded Stephen Roller's version
  Justin Balthrop & Lance Bradley, core developers of Cake 
    http://github.com/ninjudd/cake - if they weren't   constantly adding 
    features just for this project, this would have never gotten off the 
    ground
  Allan Odgaard, for being the creator of TextMate and listening to my 
    Bundle dev noob questions

  A screencast: http://blip.tv/file/4160578
  The project repo: http://github.com/swannodette/textmate-clojure
  The Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/textmate-clojure

For those of you who always wanted to try clojure but never got around to it, swannodette's enlive tutorial is very good.

http://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial

Wow, this TextMate must really be cool if people can easily clone a rich environment like SLIME. Unfortunately I work on Linux.

Fortunately for you, you can use Emacs. Which is where SLIME comes from.

Thanks for your tip. Well, I'm using Emacs already, however, as I've outlined in another comment of mine, when using Emacs I've always the impression of using a thrown-together environment, and wished it was a more structured one. I'm talking about the environment, not the editor itself.

Well, SLIME is far more powerful than what I'm illustrating here - particularly when coupled with Common Lisp. Over time I think this bundle can achieve a good portion of that power - we're just starting out :)

Still, it misses basic things like split windows.

(A now ex-TextMate user, back to (Mac)Vim.)

Bravo! TextMate really needed a modern and definitive clojure bundle.

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