Cursive vs Cider

[colinfleming]

@otwieracz

REPL is nothing like in Emacs.

That is probably true.

@otwieracz

Seems like raw text buffer, difficult to work with.

This is definitely not true. One thing that can be confusing for newcomers to Cursive is that the REPL pane is split into separate input and output sections - see the animations here. In particular in the dark theme the division can be hard to spot, and for some reason the input pane appears collapsed for a very small number of users. But mostly it’s just slightly unfamiliar so they’re not sure what they’re looking at.

The output pane is indeed just raw text (because, well, that’s what output is), but the input pane is a fully-featured editor.

@otwieracz

Keyboard shortcuts are painful, there’s no something like C-c C-c in emacs to compile current defun .

There is Tools->REPL->Send top form to REPL which I think is what you are looking for. You can rebind all the keys to whatever you like.

@otwieracz

CIDER has good enough stepper-debugger, totally necessary with Clojure’s lack of meaningful error messages ( cider-eval-defu-at-point with universal-argument in emacs ( C-u C-c C-c ). I’ve found nothing nearly as convenient in Cursive.

As @tbaldridge stated, Cursive has a full debugger - see “Starting a debug REPL” on that page. It’s subject to some limitations that I discussed above, if you’d like a better idea of how it works check out my Clojure/West talk, which was more or less a 40-minute demo with a lot of discussion of the advantages and pitfalls.