Clojure Editor / IDE Guidelines for Mac OS X

Question

I am starting to learn the Clojure programming language. Are there any recommendations for Clojure editors / IDEs on Mac OS X?

Update 2009-09-23 : The Clojure space has changed a lot since I originally posted this question. Many of the links below, especially those related to clojure-mode with Emacs, are deprecated. The best Clojure IDE I found was the Netbeans Enclojure plugin, which was recently released (2009-08-25).

Update 2010-04-30 . Another very good article on this subject: Clojure IDEs - The Grand Tour Lau B. Jensen. Also, for my own development of Clojure, I really switched to Emacs / swank-clojure .

Answer 1

You can try NetBeans with Enclojure .

Answer 2

To configure Aquamacs, Slime and Clojure there is a screencast on lispcast.com :

http://www.lispcast.com/drupal/node/79 (broken link)

Edit: What a nice alternate screencast you found Jman. I added it to my answer so that it is more complete.

Answer 3

Emacs + SLIME will be most productive if you are going to spend time editing Lisp code and not do a lot of Java.

Paredit is also required, since it is almost impossible to insert invalid s-expressions. It takes some getting used to, but it's worth it.

Answer 4

One of the big 3 Java IDE developments is IntelliJ IDEA. Previously, it had a smaller market share because it was not free, as in beer. JetBrains now provides the Community Edition IntelliJ IDEA . I'm not a regular Mac user, but OS X 'I use these "people" , says that he also works there.

IDEA has a plugin called La Clojure , available directly from the plugin manager in the Settings section, which makes Clojure development enjoyable and productive.

I tried before

• WaterFront , for which the "IDE" is an IMO, is a bit affordable;
• Counterclockwise , a pretty good Eclipse plugin; and
• Enclojure , NetBeans plugin.

but anticipate your stay with IDEA and La Clojure

Answer 5

Rich Hickey uses Aquamacs in all of his demos. He commented on this, saying he switched to it after someone created Clojure mode for Emacs. I also created Clojure mode for jEdit .

Currently, tool support for Clojure is quite limited. I think you are either stuck in an Emacs variant or jEdit .

Answer 6

If you are on the emacs route, I highly recommend using clojure -paredit. Paredit takes some getting used to, but it does reinforce the concept of code-data.

Answer 7

Emacs with Slime might be a good choice. See the article that explains the setup.

Answer 8

Emacs Carbon with SLIME and clojure mod works like a charm. I tried Aquamacs before and it is too different from the emacs command line for me. I really do not like Terminal.app, and after several months of struggle with it, I decided to switch to Carbon.

Answer 9

This is an old question, but the Clojure tool landscape has evolved quite a bit.

The following options are currently available:

• Color chart , very easy to start.
• IntelliJ + Cursive or La Clojure . Someone once recommended italics to me.
• vim + fireplace . I know that some very productive people use it.
• Emacs + CIDER and Paredit , my personal choice. Rich Hickey seems to be using Aquamacs .

I personally learned how to use Emacs for use with Clojure, although some may argue that learning two things at the same time is not a good idea.

There is a survey here regarding the popularity of IDEs / editors:

Stones Emacs!

Answer 10

I dug up and found this link very useful:

http://paulbarry.com/articles/2008/07/02/getting-started-with-clojure-and-aquamacs

Answer 11

TextMate is an excellent editor and has a Lisp package that will be sufficient for Clojure (the available package is also available here ). I have always used TextMate + Lisp package to write Clojure code.

Answer 12

I use Vim for Clojure and enjoy it. I installed the Vim Clojure plugin mentioned on the wiki and also followed the instructions to make REPL more user friendly using rlwrap .

Answer 13

Light Table is very good; Unfortunately, I cannot run it on my Mac because I am stuck on OS X 10.6 and it needs 10.7 +.

I use Light Table on another Mac and on several Windows computers - it's pretty nice.

[I used open source help.]

Answer 14

Bill Clementson updated his setup.

Answer 15

You can also try IntellliJ IDEA with the La Clojure plugin.

Answer 16

I have been using Clojure on MacOSX for about 3 months. I am very pleased with Emacs and use it for more tasks. The start was pretty hard, but now I would say it's worth the effort to learn emacs. For IntelliJ 10, the La Clojure plugin has been updated, so it should now work with Clojure 1.2.0.