clojure-cli-config VS use-package

Programming Clojure 3rd edition does have some minimal coverage of the CLI but it just barely made it to publication and a lot has been added since. You might find the CLI guide (https://clojure.org/guides/deps_and_cli) and CLI reference (https://clojure.org/reference/deps_and_cli) to be helpful for some questions. The Practicalli guide (https://practical.li/clojure/) has a number of good pages and resources on repl, tools, and use.

Yeah this is grim.

There is https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn which solves this but it’s not linked to from any official docs which seems a miss to me. As well as the config and full documentation, it also comes with a video walking you through a demo of all the features.

I was lost when I moved to deps from lein, but just forking and cloning https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn as $HOME/.clojure solved the problem - this base deps.edn contained all the aliases I needed - creating a new project, searching and adding dependencies, hooking up data inspectors like portal or reveal, testing, code coverage, benchmarking, building uberjar etc. Moving to deps also introduced me to polylith [1], which has been very useful for building large multi-component projects

[1] https://polylith.gitbook.io/polylith/

When I'm looking for tooling related stuff I do always check practical.li (https://practical.li/clojure/) since it probably has a good, if terse, description and mostly has links to the good documentation (or at least the best available).

4. You need build tooling and it seemed the choices were lein (easy user experience but not “blessed” future direction? - not sure about what i’m saying here but it’s the understanding i formed). Tools.deps is the blessed approach but designed to customise the heck out of it - problematic for a beginner like me! Thankfully you can park the customisation for later and just get started with a well laid out starter https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn - there’s even a video walks you through its features, all the inspectors and visualisers are nice to know about but not needed yet on a beginner journey

Another way would be to redefine parts of the bind-key macro or its use-package support functions

The package-install call installs use-package that provides a utility of the same name to make it easier to manage packages. It's admittedly a little overkill for this specific config, but it's a cheap investment that sets you up for later success.

Granted, the Doom macro makes your code looks nice and compact. But you can get very close to that just by using do-list and define-key together. Or by using the bind-key.el package, which is included with Use-package.

> Deps is well documented.

> The issue I personally found is that I needed to look at a bunch of OS project's deps.edn to see how people commonly structure things. Other than that it is a simple tool.

This strikes me as a contradiction, because if it was well documented you wouldn’t need to look at other people’s configs to see how to use it.

My experience with deps.edn is that every time I start a project and make a deps.edn file, I immediately draw a blank and don’t know how to structure it, so I open ones from other projects to start lifting stuff out of them.

I still don’t know how to reliably configure a project to use nrepl or socket repl without just using an editor plugin. I definitely have no idea how to use those in conjunction with a tool like reveal.

To me, none of that is simple. Simple would be like Emacs’ use-package. With that I know how to add dependencies, specify keybinds, and do initialization and configuration off the top of my head. And it has really nice documentation with tons of examples.

https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

Since you are doing code development, the first things to go for would be setting up your emacs packaging (installing use-package and melpa (use-package's documentation covers this) so you have more packages to choose from (do be careful to not just pick things willy nilly but research them a bit first)) and then setting up lsp-mode. lsp-mode lets you use LSP servers for the specific programming languages you work with in a somewhat unified fashion. You then need to install and setup the LSP servers for the languages you use, and possibly install language specific Emacs packages as support (note, Emacs has builtin functionality for many).

I'm using use-package as my package manager and the package ligature for the ligatures.

I have been crafting my emacs config for about 10 years. I started with vanilla and intentionally stayed away from frameworks. About two years ago I declared config bankruptcy and went down for a rewrite using use-package and straight.

ref: https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el https://github.com/jwiegley/use-package

use-package! is a macro over use-package, and respect its syntax, with a few additions. Useful reference on use-package keywords.