Frequently Asked Questions

CIDER stands for Clojure Interactive Development Environment that Rocks.

Yes.

CIDER officially supports Emacs 25.1+, Java 8+ and Clojure(Script) 1.8+.

nrepl.el was renamed to CIDER in version 0.3 to avoid confusion with the nREPL server itself and to better reflect the fact that CIDER is way more than an nREPL client for Emacs. Additionally, the new name presents us with the opportunity to support alternative evaluation backends (e.g. the socket REPL introduced in Clojure 1.8) down the road.

monroe is basically a fork of an old CIDER version before the time we started relying on nREPL middleware.

There’s pretty much no relationship, other than the fact they have the same author. inf-clojure provides a REPL based on the comint Emacs package - you’re basically running an external REPL process inside of Emacs (there’s no network connectivity involved). The advantage of this is that you have no external dependencies what-so-ever - you just need some command to start a REPL process for you (e.g. lein repl).

Cursive is pretty awesome! Depending on your programming preferences (using an IDE vs building a custom editing experience tailored to your needs) it might be a better option for you than CIDER.

The codenames are usually some of the favourite places of CIDER’s head maintainer (Bozhidar).

There’s nothing particularly complex in CIDER itself, but getting to grips with Emacs might be a bit challenging for some people.

Generally you can simplify the initial learning experience a lot by using some Emacs "starter kit" and picking up a good book on Emacs (e.g. Mastering Emacs).

Prelude and Spacemacs are some great Emacs distributions that you might consider using.

Prelude is maintained by the primary CIDER author himself, while Spacemacs is an excellent option for vim refugees (as it places a heavy emphasis on vim emulation via evil-mode).

No. Stable releases are issued when the maintainers feel a new release is warranted. The maintainers generally aim to deliver at least 2-3 stable releases per year.

There’s no precise roadmap, but there are a few major goals for the (near) future:

You can find more details in our roadmap document.

Yep. We want to give people a reason to talk about CIDER at such events. :-)

It’s pretty stable. Serious regression are introduced rather rarely and are usually fixed within a few hours. Using the MELPA build gives you early access to new features and you’re also helping the maintainers with the testing process.

Yes, you can. You just need to remove the cider package, pin cider to MELPA Stable and reinstall it. Basically you need to do the following:

No, you can’t. Unfortunately package.el doesn’t support the concept of historical versions of a package - there’s always only one version that’s available - the latest one.

Maybe. Our focus remains making the most out of nREPL, but down the road we might explore investing some time in adding support for additional REPL servers.

Same answer as above. One thing is certain - prepl is much more convenient for the purposes of CIDER than the plain socket REPL.

Not at all. The functionality in cider-nrepl is pretty editor-agnostic and is utilized by various editor plugins. Some prominent examples would be vim-fireplace and Visual Studio Code’s calva.

M-x customize-group RET cider RET.

Sure! See additional packages for details.

See the Support section of the manual.

Don’t panic! Next step - visit the Troubleshooting section of the manual.

There are many ways in which you can help CIDER