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Comment by LandR | Hacker News Reader

My default Clojure REPL in IdeaJ with Cursive has colour coding, hints from the docs etc. If I type

     (set/union a b)

it will auto add the set namespac, it has history etc. Supports paredit.

It will also do some autocomplete, although this seems flakey.

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Yeah, it is the only one that somehow approaches the experience from commercial Common Lisp environments.

Not trying to convince anyone, but if someone is already using Clojure with Emacs (which the annual survey seems to suggest is the most common case): those are all features you get with CIDER + clj-refactor as well. If you use spacemacs, I think they mostly just work out of the box if you turn on the Clojure layer (and maybe turn on clj-refactor -- I forget if that's an option or a default now).

Can it also display graphical representations of data structures, notebook style like Lisp Machines and commercial Common Lisps?

That's not one of the features GP enumerated, but, yes, there are lots of flavors of accomplishing that while using CIDER.

The two most common ways I've seen people accomplish something like that is probably Clojure's builtin inspector functionality and CIDER's general ability to display any kind of image (which conveniently lets it do stuff like plotting as well). If your focus is on the permanence and documentation aspect of the notebook experience, you're probably going to be happier with ob-clojure or Gorilla REPL. If your focus is on the exploratory part, you're probably going to be happier with REBL, or if you really want everything inside an emacs buffer you might do that with walmartlabs' datascope. I do everything with cider-inspect because I don't find the graphical visualization that valuable -- most of my data structures are too large so I ~always end up writing a specter query ~immediately.

All of this is for Clojure specifically. If you're writing in-browser apps you'll probably like frisk (through re-frisk or data-frisk), where you can do this stuff right in your browser next to the app:

http://odinodin.no/x/datafrisk/

https://github.com/flexsurfer/re-frisk

-- but that's not technically in CIDER, though you can certainly use it from CIDER.

Thanks for the overview.

The Datafy[0] protocol can be implemented for literally anything, and some people have made some pretty nice pretty printers for it, like Rebl[1]

[0]https://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.datafy-api.html [1]https://github.com/cognitect-labs/REBL-distro

Thanks.

Other good clojure add on for ideaj is rainbow brackets!

And clojure pretty symbols.

Slightly tangential: the Rainbow Brackets plugin is awesome and I use it in PyCharm too because it makes nested parens in math formulas a bit easier on the eye.

I use it in every single IntelliJ IDE I use. It is highly underrated in my opinion. When I first saw it suggested I was immediately sure it would be useful. Somebody tried to argue that good spacing is the way to resolve any confusion with multiple parens, but I don't think so, visual colors are way better. Java devs love to put curly braces egyptian style, I prefer the C# approach personally, but with Rainbow braces I don't have to care.

> It will also do some autocomplete, although this seems flakey

Can you explain this point. Is it possible that you might have forgotten to sync the new code with the repl. Editor and repl use different completion backends in cursive.

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