I’m glad to report that yesterday the long-awaited preliminary support for clojure-ts-mode in CIDER has landed!1

This pull request (or rather the original PR on which it was based) was in the works for a very long time and it feels good to see it finally merged. What does this mean in practice? Well, CIDER will now properly recognize clojure-ts-mode and modes derived from it, meaning most of the functionality in CIDER will work reasonably well with them. There are a few caveats to keep in mind, though:

  • CIDER still has a hard dependency on clojure-mode, as it relies on some APIs from it that have yet to be ported to clojure-ts-mode
  • Some functionality like dynamic indentation and dynamic font-locking (syntax highlighting) is still not support by clojure-ts-mode
  • You need to use the latest version of clojure-ts-mode, as it features some related changes
  • The new code hasn’t been test much, so probably we’ll encounter some bugs along the way
  • You’ll need to use a snapshot release of CIDER (e.g. one installed from MELPA), as there’s no stable CIDER release with this functionality yet (CIDER 1.14 will be the first one)
  • You need to be on Emacs 29 to be able to use clojure-ts-mode in the first place

At any rate - we’ve made one big step towards decoupling CIDER from clojure-mode and gradually we’ll get there. Thanks to everyone who was involved in making this happen! Keep hacking!

  1. I’d suggest checking out https://metaredux.com/posts/2023/03/12/clojure-mode-meets-tree-sitter.html if you’re not familiar with clojure-ts-mode. ↩