Daily Clojure workflow

It’s already been a month since I started my new job.¹ All is going well and just as expected, and it’s been interesting to see how my carefully tuned Emacs configuration dealt with everyday Clojure programming.

Truth be told, I’ve never used Emacs consistently for work. Before Clojure I mainly did Java and Emacs support for Java is not as good as what it offers for other programming languages. Yes, I kept Emacs around for other stuff, but it would be a dull lie to tell I was proudly using Emacs all day in the office.

Anyway, Clojure is the new kid in town now so it’s Emacs all the way. The obvious first choice is CIDER and I genuinely don’t have enough words to say how wonderful it is. I couple it with clj-refactor and Smartparens to get the most out of my coding experience.

I especially love how CIDER enables me to switch easily between Clojure and ClojureScript, with two REPLs ready to go and documentation just under my fingertips. clj-refactor enriches exploratory development with hot reloading of dependencies and handy change of missing requires.

Then there is Projectile. Even on small Clojure projects we are using to test available libraries there are plenty of files around. Mickey Petersen talks about tempo when it comes to using Emacs. Projectile guarantees you don’t lose your tempo while working on projects of different sizes.

What else? I don’t think Magit needs my over enthusiastic words. Ivy is proving to be the right tool at the right time, with Swiper ever so helpful. And now I am only waiting for the day we will need proper documents to bring out the almighty AUCTeX.

In the immortal words of Bozhidar Batsov:²

Emacs is power.

Emacs is magic.

Emacs is fun.

Emacs is forever.