Hi James, I have indeed tried LightTable, and it does indeed seem promising. Really exciting potential. But I've hit enough snags every time I've tried it that I haven't really found it useful (either for teaching or for my own use).
I just tried the latest version again, just now, and just for anyone who may care here are my (opinionated, and YMMV) reactions: 1. Is there auto-reindentation? I don't see it. Pretty essential, IMHO. 2. I can close a tab (like the documentation) if I control-click on it, but the pane remains... and I've ended up with lots of panes that I have to quit to get rid of. In general I love the look of the GUI but wish the controls were more obvious/standard in many cases. 3. Can automatic bracket insertion be turned off? It's problematic in my book, especially for newcomers who should be allowed to use the keyboarding skills that they already have. 4. Is there a block comment/uncomment feature? 5. The console output precedes every line with the file that generated it, which means that you can't get a clean output log. Lots of the code that I and my students write is oriented toward producing textual output in the console, and this sort of rules out those uses (unless you want to clean up the output later, which would be a pain). 6. Can I make a new project? I don't immediately see how... (Digression: tried to search the documentation for this but couldn't see how to do the search... I do get a (novel) find pane for my open editor window, but can I make that work for the documentation pane? Can I make it go away? Again, looks cool but I wish it leveraged more common GUI idioms.) 7. A new project created with lein at the command line works, but an older one gives "Light Table requires Clojure Version 1.5.1 or higher"... I see that that old project used [org.clojure/clojure "1.4.0"]... Awkward that this couldn't be run even if the IDE needs something newer for itself... 8. Expressions that produce big values can make it hard to read your code by interspersing the values, which I may not really want to see. 9. Is there anyway to get "arglist on space" or arglists (and/or documentation) in another pane or a popup or whatever, either as you type or when you hit a particular key? Overall: Very cool in several ways, some glitches or little issues that I could live with, but also quite a few that would be pretty problematic to me personally, for my teaching and/or my own use (specifically 1, 3, 5, & 9). Clooj is better on many of these issues, but it has some other weaknesses (esp that it is not maintained very actively, e.g. I don't know if it works with modern leiningen). NightCode is also getting into the running, I think. But from my perspective none of them yet fill the niche that I've been discussing. -Lee PS I'd be in Clojure IDE heaven if someone could provide some version of one of these light-weight Clojure IDEs that also incorporated nrepl-ritz so that we could see the values of locals when we hit exceptions... On Oct 7, 2013, at 4:15 PM, Jernau wrote: > Lee, > > Have you tried Light Table? I think it would be a perfect match for your > use-case. > > Here's a screencast of me using Light Table's Instarepl to teach list > comprehension in Clojure. As you will hopefully agree, Light Table's features > are a great match for a learning/teaching situation. > > Light Table's Instarepl works out-of-box after installation, so it'll be easy > to get your students up and running. Then, when your students have progressed > to wanting to create their own projects, they can install Leiningen and > continue to use Light Table (see my Datomic screencast for an example). > > Kind regards, > James -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
