nREPL 1.1.1: Improved Completion with compliment-lite
Today I’ve released nREPL 1.1.1 with a couple of small bug-fixes and one more notable, if mostly invisible change.
Historically nREPL’s completions op (introduced in nREPL 0.8) used internally a modified
version of clojure-complete, that
I eventually released as a library named
incomplete. clojure-complete was pretty
much abadonware at this point and I wanted a simple drop-in replacement that we
could use in tools like REPLy (and by association - Leiningen).1
Using the much better
compliment library wasn’t an
option, as we needed something that was quite literally a single file. (so it’d
be easy to inline in nREPL and load in REPLy) Recently, however, compliment’s
author Oleksandr Yakushev released exactly what we needed - a single-file,
stripped-down version of compliment called
compliment-lite. Here’s how it differs from the full-fledged compliment:
- Context. Completion features that require context (e.g., filtering methods by the class of the receiver object) don’t work.
- Local bindings and resources. Those two sources of completions completely rely on context, so they are disabled in Compliment-lite.
- Documentation. The
documentationfunction is absent from Compliment-lite.
None of those were things supported by incomplete, so nothing lost.
Naturally, it made sense for nREPL to adopt it and offer improved out-of-the-box
completion experience to Clojure programmers. As this doesn’t affect the public
API of nREPL2 I’ve opted to ship this change in a “bug-fix” release. A version like
1.1.1 is just too cool to pass up!
In light of the creation of compliment-lite I now consider incomplete to be
obsolete and I’d encourage everyone looking for a simple, but capable code-completion
library to go for compliment-lite instead.
That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!