Cursive vs Cider

[colinfleming]

@jmlsf

My only real complaint is that Cursive still doesn’t understand javascript interop and creates lots of linter noise.

Thanks for the kind words, I’m glad Cursive is working well for you! JS interop can be a pain, yeah - I’m planning to fix the highlighting in the short-term, and improve the JS indexing so that type inference can do more in the long term. Sorry this is annoying in the meantime.

[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.

[bbatsov]

I guess as CIDER’s author people would expect me to say something here as well.

At this point, however, I’m sick and tired of trying to compare the benefits of different editors and IDEs, so I’ll be really brief:

• Emacs (and CIDER) is a good choice for you if you want to create a programming environment that’s uniquely tailored to you and you’re into tweaking and fine tuning everything (remember Gentoo Linux?). That will require some serious time investment, though. It took me years to really grok Emacs and to be able to bend it to my will. Then again - you’re likely smarter than me. f you just want something that works out of the box probably Cursive is your only option these days (to my knowledge CCW and LightTable are effectively dead).
• CIDER’s obviously open-source, so all of you can help with the development. I’ve spoken a few times about this in the past - everything (cider-nrepl, orchard, refactor-nrepl, cljs-tooling, etc) except the Emacs UI is reusable tools and libraries and every improvement to them benefits most Clojure editors out there. Even vim-fireplace users those internally.

For more details - just take a look at some of my “philosophical” talks listed here http://www.cider.mx/en/latest/additional_resources/