What is this?

I love Cognitect dev-tools, particularly REBL.

I use CIDER in Emacs, but nREPL does not current play well with REBL. There are other solutions, but they don't work how I want them to.

This repo provides the information necessary to use REBL how I use it in CIDER.

How do I use it?

The default behaviour for REBL with non-nREPL clients and with (nREPL middleware's) is to send all forms to REBL or use REBL as a REPL.

I prefer to only send specific forms to REBL as I work. This allows me to easily find the dozen or so things that I care about inspecting in a REPL session that might have 100(0)s of evaluations.

This setup allows me (or you) to send specific things (last sexp, current defun/top-level-form) to REBL with a shortcut or two.

Installation

deps.edn

I may add lein content in the future, but I don't use Leiningen.

Depending on if you use jdk8 or jdk11+, add the appropriate alias from deps.edn to your deps.edn.

The important difference from the Cognitect prescribed deps is the :main-opts. If you already use REBL then you can just change that.

.dir-locals.el

Add .dir-locals.el to your project root, or add the contents of .dir-locals.el to your existing .dir-locals.el.

This ensures that your CIDER repl starts with the correct deps (i.e. the appropriate REBL alias).

.emacs

Add the code in .emacs to your .emacs or init.el or however you want to get it into emacs.

This provides the functions for sending forms to REBL.

Workflow

Once the code/data is in the appropriate places, I cider-jack-in in my project. REBL will automatically open.

Send code to REBl with the appropriate function:

• rebl-eval-last-sexp (C-x C-r) - Send, and eval, the previous sexp to REBL.
• defun rebl-eval-defun-at-point (C-S-x) - Send, and eval, the current top-level form to REBL

REBL's taps are active and will capture anything tap>'d.

Other things

• nREBL - Uses nREPL middleware to send all forms to REBL.
• nREPL REBL - Same idea, different author.