VS Code setup for Clojure programming

The basic idea is to fork, clone, or download this repo so you can start working your way through The Brave and True without spending a thousand years setting up emacs.

Quick Start:

• Do the Minimal Environment Setup
• Open the src/good_vibes/core.clj file in the Editor
• Type ctrl+alt+c ctrl+alt+j to start the REPL (choose the Leiningen project type and the :uberjar launch profile)
• Enter (-main) in the REPL to see "Hello, World!"
• Start hacking away in the REPL tab
• Read Thinking in Calva Keyboard Shortcut Combos
• Check out Tidbits and Secret Sauce sometime

I also have plans to add some additional material to

• help you write a test for a "Brave and True" exercise
• introduce you to some fun libraries, like plumatic/schema and metosin/compojure-api

Minimal Environment Setup

Use SDKMAN! for java and leiningen.

sdk install java
sdk install leiningen

Note: Leiningen gives you Clojure

Install VS Code with these Extensions:

• Calva
• macros (by geddski)

Check that lein is on VS Code's path. "I had to do this: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/mac and then start VS Code by using code command." - NickM

Thinking in Calva Keyboard Shortcut Combos

ctrl+shift+p is the VS Code keybinding for Show All Commands. Therefore, a lot of docs have you start there so that you can find the command they want you to use.

The Calva commands are often combos of two keystrokes, where the first keystroke of the combo is ctrl+alt+c. So, I tend to think of these combos as ctrl+alt+c Calva followed by keybinding Calva command.

For example, ctrl+alt+c ctrl+alt+j is the hot-key combo for Start a Project REPL and Connect. Putting it all together, my brain is thinking ctrl-alt-c Calva ctrl-alt-j Jack-in

The Top 10 Calva Commands according to calva.io.

Tidbits and Secret Sauce

Slurp and Barf

Learn about Slurp Forward and Barf Forward in the Editing section of Paredit, a Visual Guide. They are by far the most helpful Paredit commands.

Some helpful settings and macros (The Secret Sauce)

Calva specific workspace settings are in .vscode/settings.json. Also consider calva.replConnectSequences.

calvaRebuild SHOULD do everything necessary to update all of the namespaces in the REPL, but I'm not sure it actually does. You may need to do this twice because file order is not deterministic and if you change a function name or something, dependent files may fail the first time.

Add the keyboard shortcut bindings from clj-keybindings to keybindings.json via ctrl+shift+p > Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON)

Note: It would be nice to have a .vscode/keybindings.json file, but this VSCode issue explains why it's not supported, and suggests making an extension (which doesn't look so simple to me!).

Think of ctrl+alt+c ctrl+alt+k as “kill REPL”.

prettifier (formatter)

In project.clj,

 :plugins [[lein-cljfmt "0.6.4"] ...

$ git ls-files -mo | egrep -v '^target/' | egrep '.clj$'
… returns new and modified clojure files. So,
$ git ls-files -mo | egrep -v '^target/' | egrep '.clj$' | xargs lein cljfmt check

user profiles

~/.lein/profiles.clj

{:oscar {:jvm-opts ["-DDB_HOST=…"]}}

linter

.clj-kondo/config.edn

{:linters {:refer-all {:level :off}}}

Update .gitignore to suppress files create by linter: .clj-kondo/.cache/*/lock.

Update .gitignore to suppress files created by Calva “Run … tests” commands: *.transit.json.

Alternatives

Clojure environment options that didn't get chosen (obviously).

emacs, vim, tmux, ...

Gorilla-REPL is an alternative "in the notebook style. You can think of it like a pretty REPL that can plot graphs and draw tables, or you can think of it as an editor for rich documents that can contain interactive Clojure code, graphs, tables, notes, LaTeX formulae."