Easel Turns One One year of building my own IDE in Clojure

(blog.phronemophobic.com)

89 points | by todsacerdoti 4 days ago

3 comments

  • oxalorg 2 hours ago
    This sounds very close to my dream IDE, I've always wanted to build a smalltalk + emacs like editor/ide in Clojure but never got around to it.

    I wanted to try Easel but there were no instructions how. This is how I got it running:

      git clone git@github.com:phronmophobic/easel.git
      clj -X:deps prep
      clj
      # now in repl
      => ((requiring-resolve 'com.phronemophobic.easel/run))
  • Pelayu 1 hour ago
    Amazing project!

    >While the JVM solves lots of hard problems, it has one major weakness, the UI libraries provided by the JVM (Swing and JavaFX) are clunky and dated.

    I also feel this; it's what puts me off writing GUI apps in Clojure. I have hope that natively compiled Clojure implementations like Jank that could interact with C or C++ libraries could help with this.

    • geokon 20 minutes ago
      what specifically did you have issues with?

      i made a GUI with cljfx which uses JavaFX and I didnt really hit any issues (save for i have one bug on startup that ive had trouble ironing out). The app is snappy and feels as native as anything else

      Ended with a very modular functional GUI program

      the only thing i wasnt super happy about is that i couldnt package it as a simple .bin/.exe bc the jpackage system forces you into making an installer/application (its been a few years since, so its possible theres a graal native solution now)

      i highly recommend cljfx. Its the opposite of clunky

  • sroerick 4 days ago
    Hey, this is absolutely amazing