Clojure editor/IDE recommendations on 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 tremendously since I originally posted this question. Many of the links below, especially those that refer to clojure-mode with Emacs, are out-of-date. The best Clojure IDE I found was the Enclojure Netbeans plugin which was recently released (2009-08-25).

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

Solution 1

You can try NetBeans with Enclojure.

Solution 2

For setting up Aquamacs, Slime and Clojure, there's a screencast on lispcast.com:

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

Edit: That's a nice alternate screencast you found Jman. I've added it to my answer so it's a bit more comprehensive.

Solution 3

One of the "big 3" Java development IDEs is IntelliJ IDEA. It used to get less market share because it's not free as in beer. JetBrains is now providing a Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA . I'm not a regular Mac user myself, but the OS X 'I use this' folks say it runs there too.

IDEA has a plugin called La Clojure, available directly from the plugin manager under "Settings," that makes Clojure development pleasant and productive.

Previously, I tried

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

but anticipate staying with IDEA and La Clojure

Solution 4

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

At the moment, tool support for Clojure is pretty limited. I think you're either stuck with some Emacs variant or jEdit.

Solution 5

If you go the emacs route, I highly recommend using clojure-paredit. Paredit takes some getting used to, but it really reinforces the "code is data" notion.

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Comments

[Matt Curtis]

And the best thing about Aquamacs/Emacs is, once you get past the first couple of weeks of learning a new editor, you'll have gained a power tool you can use for just about anything.

[Brian Gianforcaro]

Played around with Enclojure and it's a decent environment I really like it.

[Rayne]

They need to get windows support.

[Mark Bolusmjak]

+1. Have loved IntelliJ IDEA for ever. Clojure support is great.

[blevlabs]

Emacs is the original IDE. I've tried them all, and haven't yet found one that can do something Emacs can't. Conversely, all of them lack features that Emacs has. For any coding, and particularly for Lisp coding, it can't be beat. And on the off chance you find a feature lacking in Emacs, it's really a Lisp runtime that happens to come with a lot of pre-written code for text editing, so you can add it fairly easily.

[Jonik]

This answer is duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/257333/…

[Dirk Jäckel]

The Community Edition also supports the La Clojure Plugin and is free and Open Source (Apache 2.0 license). And it works great :-)

[dskrvk]

I would recommend Cursive over La Clojure. It has a much more useable REPL, is better at static code analysis, and has some other nice features like structural editing.