Looking for clj/deps REPL Tools
This morning I did a little looking for any tools that worked in the clj/deps system that was like the Leiningen plugins that did color syntax highlighting, and data formatting that I find very useful when the result of a function is a complicated data structure, or a sequence. I have been using whidbey as it works just fine with JDK 11 and any Clojure past 1.8.
The issue is that a good friend switched to the clj/deps package management and build tool for Clojure, and likes it quite a lot. So I've been trying to built up a way to do the same kinds of things in that ecosystem as with Leiningen. I didn't have a lot of luck the last time I looked, but maybe something was out there now? Or maybe I'd get a little lucky on the words I used in the search?
I found something that was close: rebel-readline. This is nice in that it's a simple readline replacement for the REPL, so it's not something that has to have a special environment - or a different app. I liked that it was able to do a lot of things on the readline that whidbey couldn't - because whidbey wasn't really active on the "read part" of the REPL - but more really on the "print part". This was nice, and I really liked that it was capable of showing the Clojure docs on the function - and it was fast, so that's a plus... but almost by definition - it wouldn't do anything on the output. So that wasn't as successful as I'd hoped.
Then a friend pointed out Reveal - and this was a lot more than I was looking for - the graphs, the processing of the output... this is a lot more like Gorilla REPL, that I've used, and written about in the past. It's all done in a browser, and Reveal is in a terminal session - so it's not exactly the same - but it's certainly something that is more of a joint "formatter and visualization tool" than just syntax highlighting and formatting of the REPL output.
I'll keep the links around, and maybe someone will write something like rebel-readline - but for the print (output) loop for the REPL... that would be nice. Until then, we carry on...