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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Sometimes its the little things that make a difference and after seeing how easily customise the Clojure REPL prompt with Leiningen I had a little hack with words, symbols and colours and came up with something nicer (in my opinion).

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Dale Thatcher from the London Clojure community created a Clojure project that allows you to fly a plane in real time. Now, Dale has not yet connected this to a real plane, instead he is using the open source flight simulator, FlightGear.

I took Dale’s project for a test flight and here are my experiences!

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Leiningen is a project automation tool (think build tool and them some) that uses a Clojure macro to make it easy for Clojure developers to manage their project lifecycle.

A Clojure project managed by Leiningen uses a simple clojure file called project.clj which allows developers to define a whole range of stuff about their projects. To get started you only have to define a name, a version of Clojure and any dependencies in your project.clj and Leininge does the rest.

So lets take a quick look under the hood of Leiningen and its defproject macro to see what is going on.

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Emacs is a really powerful tool for Clojure development, although without a guiding hand it can be a bit of a learning curve. Using the Emacs Live its really simple to get a fully featured development environment for Clojure. I will show you how to get Emacs Live installed and how to start using it for Clojure.

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Emacs is fun to configure and if you have the basics of LISP or Clojure then its pretty easy too. After reading how to replace the text on the modeline I decided to customise my mode-line to make it more efficient for Clojure development. I’ll cover how I tweaked the mode line and added this customisation to my Emacs Live based configuration.

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Even though I use .gitignore files to control common files that should not be committed to a git repository, its very easy to forget about the backup or temporary files that my development tools generate. As these auto-generated files are development tool specific, they are not always included in a .gitignore file.

Especially when you are under pressure to commit changes or deploy your code its easy to include a few things you dont need, especially when using the commands git add . or git commit -am "".

So when I discovered the idea of using a .gitignore_global file, I quicky adopted this and saved myself a lot of time with this simple approach.

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So as soon as I decided to write about LightTable, the developers go and improve a whole bunch of things. With the 0.2.3 release that happened earlier today the configuration of LightTable now works correctly.

This change is going to make it so much easier to use LightTable for demo’s and coding dojo’s. The has been an update to the default solarized light theme that looks very pretty to me.

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LightTable is a kickstarter project to create new kind of developer tool for Clojure development, inspired by the Inventing on Principle talk by Bret Victor.

LightTable aims to give developers instant feedback about their code, showing how any change affects their applications. Giving you a developer “surface” to work on, which will bring information to the places you need it the most. The principles of the LightTable design include:

• Documentation there when you need it, no need to search
• Edit anywhere and anything - not just text and not just as files
• Discover by doing, changes produces instantaneous results
• Shine a light on related pieces of code

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I was a little surprised to have an access issue with Heroku when using my new Mac Book Pro, as its always been really easy to deploy my applications to Heroku in the past.  I kicked myself when I realised I’d only set up a public key specifically for my Github account.

This got me to wondering the best way to set up keys given I am using different services for both personal project and work.

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