Calva: Clojure & ClojureScript Interactive Programming installs statistics

Calva: A Clojure & ClojureScript IDE in Visual Studio Code

Distilled from CIDER*.

Welcome to Calva, an integrated, REPL powered, development environment for enjoyable and productive Clojure and ClojureScript programming in Visual Studio Code. It includes:

• inline code evaluation
• structural editing
• code formatting
• code navigation
• a debugger
• linting
• syntax highlighting
• Clojure aware rainbow brackets
• a test runner
• refactoring support
• and much more.

A lot of effort has been put into making Calva a good choice to start if you are new to Clojure. Calva is open source and free to use.

(*) Calva is short for Calvados, a liquid gifted to humanity from God. Calvas's REPL power is harvested from the produce of The Orchard.

Users Like it 😍

Crispin Bennett's review:

This is great, and makes VS Code a truly viable IDE/editor for clojure development. It has great REPL support (including inline evaluation), an extensive Paredit implementation, and excellent linting (care of the bundled clj-kondo). Calva is being improved on at an impressive clip by maintainers who appear solidly committed to its ongoing development. It's well-documented, and manages to be both approachable and capable. A no-brainer if you're already a VS Code user, and well worth a look if you're not.

It's Easy to Get Started

Get Started with Clojure in VS Code in 20 seconds

There is Documentation

Head over to calva.io to learn more about how to use Calva. The most important stuff would be:

• Connect Calva to Your Project (TL;DR; Use Jack in.)
• Quirks (Yes, there are quirks.)
• Paredit – a Visual Guide (Clojure editing is for civilized people.)

Why Calva?

From The Tao of Calva:

Calva's raison d´être is to provide Visual Studio Code users with an easy to use and productive environment for Clojure and ClojureScript development.

From the same page you can also learn that we want Calva to be a good choice for VS Code users asking:

How do I use my favorite code editor for Clojure development?

We also hope that Calva will contribute to making it easier to pick up Clojure as a new language.

Getting Started with Calva

Go to the documentation to find info on how to connect Calva to your project and start evaluating code and such. The documentation is built from this repository, and the source files are located in docs/site. So if you know about workarounds or gotchas or anything that is good to know about when using Calva, please edit the appropriate page (or create a new page) by PR.

Features

• Syntax highlighting, plus:
  • Rainbow parens
  • Rainbow indent guides
  • Highlight active indent guide
  • Highlights misplaced brackets
  • LISP friendly bracket matching
  • Ignore form (#_) dimming and (comment) form highlighting
• Code formatting and autoindent according to The Clojure Style Guide
• Structural Editing (via Paredit)
• Linting
• Intellisense
• Go to / peek at definition
• Find all references
• Rename symbol
• Change all occurrences
• References code lens (enable in settings)
• Outline view
• View doc strings on hover
• View function signatures on hover, including help with knowing which argument you are typing
• Debugger
• Support for Clojure tools/deps, Leiningen, shadow-cljs, Figwheel Main, lein-figwheel, Clojurephant (Gradle) and the built-in ClojureScript browser/node repls. (For Boot, only Connect scenarios work, there is no Jack-in there.)
• Your Custom Connect Sequences, including fully customized ClojureScript REPLs.
• Switch the ClojureScript REPL connection between your different builds at will.
• When editing cljc files, easily choose if REPL commands should go to the clj or cljs REPL by clicking the cljc/clj[s] indicator in the status bar.
• And more

Powered in Part by Clojure-lsp

Calva uses a mix of static and dynamic analysis to power the experience. A lot of the static abilities come from clojure-lsp, and you can read more about Calva's integration of clojure-lsp in the documentation.

Demo: Evaluate top level forms inside (comment...)

The gif demos several more features, apart from the in-comment evaluation, like:…