The State of Some Emacs Packages for Clojure Development

There are quite a few packages in the “official” clojure-emacs GitHub organization, but many of them have been deprecated recently with the release of CIDER 0.7. Unfortunately not everyone is aware of this yet and I often see tickets related to those deprecated projects. In this short post I’ll outline the deprecations and provide a bit of background for them.

clojure-test-mode

The venerable clojure-test-mode was deprecated in favor of cider-test (which is bundled with CIDER 0.7). clojure-test-mode featured quite a lot of inlined Clojure code, which made the package very hard to maintain and reworking it to use nREPL middleware was a no-brainer for us. clojure-test-mode will be removed from the clojure-mode repo at some point. It also interferes with CIDER’s initialization, so you’re strongly encouraged to get rid of it.

Down the road we might extend cider-test to support other test frameworks as well (which should be feasible with different middleware providing the same interface).

company-cider

company-cider was deprecated, because company-mode integration was added to CIDER itself (making company-mode the officially supported and recommended completion library).

ac-nrepl

ac-nrepl has been superseded by ac-cider. ac-cider has a simpler codebase and leverages the compliment-based completion introduced in CIDER 0.7. We’ll probably remove ac-nrepl at some point in the future to avoid the confusion between the two.

cider-inspect

cider-inspect was absorbed into CIDER 0.7.

cider-tracing

cider-tracing was superseded by middleware-based tracing support integrated in CIDER 0.7.

Epilogue

Those deprecations are also mentioned in the documentation of the respective packages, but I feel it’s nice to have them listed together in a single document. Most of the packages will also emit load-time deprecation warnings.