inf-clojure VS neil

A really nice dev experience is if your editor can connect to socket repls. Doing this makes running a repl from a jar or from your regular "dev" setup almost indistinguishable. I can easily repl from a prod jar as from a branch in Clojure and my workflow is exactly the same because I use inf-clojure

I have the feeling, that https://github.com/clojure-emacs/inf-clojure might be a better starting point and a good stepping stone, before they get into CIDER. (but i haven't used inf-clojure enough, so it's just a gut feeling)

maybe https://github.com/clojure-emacs/inf-clojure is a better way to get started, because you don't have the convenient magic of the nREPL protocol in the picture?

So neil has a bunch of other features like project scaffolding, building, testing, adding license, etc. I really recommend you take a deep look at the repository and learn all the automatized possibilities that neil adds to your project.

Check out neil. It makes creating new deps.edn-based projects easy. It also has commands to add deps incrementally to your deps.edn with neil dep add and helps you tag new releases with neil version. You can run it in a REPL if you want, but as you can see below, it runs pretty fast in the shell. $ brew install babashka/brew/neil $ time neil new scratch play Creating project from org.corfield.new/scratch in play neil new scratch play 0.09s user 0.06s system 54% cpu 0.280 total

Full-featured test runner: https://github.com/lambdaisland/kaocha

If you install neil (https://github.com/babashka/neil), you can do `neil add test` which will automatically set up cognitect-labs/test-runner in your project. Then you can run tests with `neil test` (just an alias, you don't have to use it).

> I used Kit to bootstrap this project and the way it set up tests doesn't even work, but this was what most people recommended to me for starting a Clojure project

I don't really like the approach that Kit takes and prefer something more opinionated like Biff. I'd love to hear your feedback if you do end up trying out Biff.

For some common tasks, neil is also an option.

Let's setup a basic project that includes a logger. I think the nicest way to get a new project up is with one of the tools that Borkdude has created, called neil. If you have this installed, just run the following in an empty directory:

When I see legit anger and frustration in these comments, I also think about the newcomers who might be turned off by the funky syntax just to generate a template. That said, my solution to this wasn't to add another complaint to the thread, but to add the neil new command to solve this problem for tools.deps going forward.

There is also neil which offers some features to make working with deps.edn a little easier.