Introducing inf-clojure - a Better Basic Clojure REPL for Emacs

At Clojure/conj I had the chance to shake Rich Hickey’s hand and exchange a few words with him. When I asked him whether he currently uses CIDER or Cursive for Clojure development he replied that he preferred a simpler solution – clojure-mode & inferior-lisp-mode.

I was a bit surprised because clojure-mode’s integration with inferior-lisp-mode sucks (big time). It has always been extremely limited and was never really improved/extended. It has no Clojure specific features and no code completion. I felt that Rich and all the people using inferior-lisp-mode deserved something better, so I quickly put together inf-clojure.

inf-clojure provides some Clojure specific features like showing a var’s doc or source, derives some core functionality from clojure-mode and even features basic code-completion (and company-mode support). That’s not much admittedly, but it’s a good start. Extending inf-clojure is super easy and I expect that we’ll add a bit more features to it along the way (e.g. macroexpansion).

inf-clojure is available in MELPA and will eventually replace completely inferior-lisp-mode when clojure-mode 4.0 is released.

Keep in mind that inf-clojure is nothing like CIDER and will never be. CIDER will always be the powertool for Clojure programming in Emacs. I do understand, however, that some people are overwhelmed by CIDER and some people simply don’t need anything sophisticated. I hope they’ll enjoy inf-clojure!