Using templates to create your Clojure projects can save you a lot of setup time and ensure your team is using the same base configuration and dependencies. There are templates on Clojars.org, however I’ll show you how easy it is to create your own with Leiningen.

I’ll create a simple template based on the leiningen default template, adding a section in the project.clj to give a custom propmt when run in the repl.

Templates used to be a Leinigen pluging called lein-newnew and its repo was the only doucmentation I found and was a little outdated. The plugin is now part of Leiningen and there are a few built in templates. There is also information via lein help new.

If you want to create a template in a more automatic way from a more complete project you created, take a look at the lein-create-template Leinignen plugin.

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An effective way to have a clean and valuable commit history is to create the smallest valuable commit each time, with a descriptive commit message. This sounds obvious, but when you are in the midst of work things can get messy. Using Emacs Magit you can be highly selective as to what changes you include in each commit, down to individual characters.

This follows on from staging patches for cleaner commits with the command line, git add -p. Also see how to drive Git with Emacs and Magit for more background.

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Continuing my modeline customisation with powerline, I wanted to add colour to match the Cyberpunk theme of Emacs Live. To do this I copied the default them and custmised it, adding colours and chaning the style of seperatr. Here is how I customised the powerline code to make my own theme.

See how I previously tweaked Emacs modeline with powerline, as this article carries on from that. My modeline also includes an earlier tweak for the minor modes.

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It important to enjoy the development tools you use day after day, so after seeing some of the great looking Emacs modeline customisations, I couldnt resist pimping my modeline (again).

Previously I tweaked the modeline for Clojure development, this time I’ve added styling to the modeline using powerline. I aim to create a modeline worthy of the rest of the Emacs Live experience.

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CIDER is the Clojure IDE and REPL for Emacs. It is built on top of nREPL, the Clojure networked REPL server and replaces the direct use of nREPL in Emacs.

In this article we are using CIDER that is packaged in Emacs Live, a very complete, well organised and extensible configuration for Clojure and many other things in Emacs.

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Light Table provides a great development environment for Clojure, ClojureScript & JavaScript. With a few tweaks and some of the many plugins you can make Light Table do even more. Here are a few of the tweaks and plugins I use for my development with Light Table.

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After upgrading to Java 8, Clojure development seemed faster due to quicker REPL startup times. So when I saw a snapshot of Java 9 had been released I was hopeful that startup performance would be even faster.

As Clojure runs on the Java Virtual machine (JVM), each time you start a REPL then you wait for a new JVM to start. Other than this REPL startup, Clojure feels faster than developing with Java directly.

Here is how I set up Java 9 Snapshot on my Linux laptop (Ubuntu 14.10), it should be the same for any decent operating system.

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When I teach people Clojure I use Light Table because it is really simple to use and its Instarepl gives instant feedback of the code as you type it. This feedback helps you understand Clojure quickly and gives you more confidence when coding.

As I do most of my Clojure development (and most everything else) in Emacs I really miss the excellent Emacs keybindings when I use Light Table. Luckily there is an Emacs plugin for Light Table, so here is a quick guide on how to install & use this Emacs plugin.

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This holiday season give the gift of code… or anything else no matter how small to help out your favorite open source project. By joining the 24 pull requests website with your Github account, you can challenge yourself to contribute to 24 projects through December.

Here is a quick guide to creating pull requests on Github.

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This holiday season give the gift of code… or anything else no matter how small to help out your favorite open source project. By joining the 24 pull reuests website with your Github account, you can challenge yourself to contribute to 24 projects through December.

Here are some reasons why you should contribute to open source projects.

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