Is there a colored REPL for Clojure?

Question

I'd like to get a colored REPL for clojure code, similar to what you can do with IRB for Ruby.

Are there any libraries or settings for user.clj that provide automatic coloring of the REPL?

Example IRB:

alt text

Similar question: [What to do to make `lein repl` colorful?](http://stackoverflow.com/q/19500353/578288) — Rory O'Kane, Oct 01 '14 at 08:45

score 28 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 05 '15 at 00:14

Rather late to the party, here, but you can get this from using the Leiningen plugin Ultra (which also has support for colorized stacktraces and pretty-printed test output), or by adding Whidbey to your list of Leiningen plugins instead.

Sample Ultra REPL: enter image description here

score 17 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:54

I do not know of any way to have the basic Clojure REPL, as started by something like java -cp clojure.jar clojure.main, do syntax highlighting. If, however, you use Emacs & SLIME (the development environment of choice of a great part of the Clojure community!), then you can have the SLIME REPL highlight syntax like clojure-mode does.

First, you'll have to lift some code from the clojure-mode function (defined towards the top of clojure-mode.el):

;;; all code in this function lifted from the clojure-mode function
;;; from clojure-mode.el
(defun clojure-font-lock-setup ()
  (interactive)
  (set (make-local-variable 'lisp-indent-function)
       'clojure-indent-function)
  (set (make-local-variable 'lisp-doc-string-elt-property)
       'clojure-doc-string-elt)
  (set (make-local-variable 'font-lock-multiline) t)

  (add-to-list 'font-lock-extend-region-functions
               'clojure-font-lock-extend-region-def t)

  (when clojure-mode-font-lock-comment-sexp
    (add-to-list 'font-lock-extend-region-functions
                 'clojure-font-lock-extend-region-comment t)
    (make-local-variable 'clojure-font-lock-keywords)
    (add-to-list 'clojure-font-lock-keywords
                 'clojure-font-lock-mark-comment t)
    (set (make-local-variable 'open-paren-in-column-0-is-defun-start) nil))

  (setq font-lock-defaults
        '(clojure-font-lock-keywords    ; keywords
          nil nil
          (("+-*/.<>=!?$%_&~^:@" . "w")) ; syntax alist
          nil
          (font-lock-mark-block-function . mark-defun)
          (font-lock-syntactic-face-function
           . lisp-font-lock-syntactic-face-function))))

Then add it to the slime-repl-mode-hook:

(add-hook 'slime-repl-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (font-lock-mode nil)
            (clojure-font-lock-setup)
            (font-lock-mode t)))

Et voilà, next time you connect to the SLIME REPL you'll have clojure-mode syntax highlighting available. If you use SLIME for Common Lisp too, you'll want to tweak this so it doesn't try to do Clojure highlighting with CL. Also, this is just a first approximation; one thing it sort of breaks is prompt highlighting (the namespace> thing will not be highlighted anymore). I'm not a proficient font-lock hacker by any stretch of the imagination, though, so I'll leave it at that. :-)

Oh, by the way, this really *replaces* SLIME REPL highlighting with clojure-mode highlighting... There are some useful things about the usual REPL highlighting which one might miss when using this. Hopefully at some point this can be refined to make this less of a trade-off. — Michał Marczyk, Mar 19 '10 at 06:11
Unfortunately I am not an Emacs user, but this does look cool. — thnetos, Mar 19 '10 at 15:56
@thnetos: Thanks! @All whom this may concern: I've put the code in a Gist here: http://gist.github.com/337280 -- the current version includes two `defadvice` s to make the prompt and printouts on `*out*` be highlighted as they usually are in SLIME REPL, while everything else still gets clojure-mode highlights. — Michał Marczyk, Mar 28 '10 at 02:27
The most up-to-date version of this code is now part of [Phil Hagelberg](http://technomancy.us/)'s new [durendal](http://github.com/technomancy/durendal) project. — Michał Marczyk, Sep 19 '10 at 02:38
CIDER's REPL has built-in colouring support (although it doesn't work quite like this, as expressions get font-locked after being evaluated). — Bozhidar Batsov, Jun 09 '14 at 14:28

score 9 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 30 '14 at 01:49

9

If you just want to color the prompt and you are using Leiningen (which you should), you can use :repl-options and ANSI escape sequences:

:repl-options {:prompt (fn [ns]
                         (str "\033[1;32m"
                              ns "=>"
                              "\033[0m "))}

References:

edited Sep 30 '14 at 01:49

Rory O'Kane

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answered May 13 '13 at 15:18

0x89

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To make this apply to your user rather than a single project, add this to `~/.lein/profiles.clj` – Drew Noakes Feb 12 '14 at 15:35
2

Put this in `~/.lein/profiles.clj` for global colored repl: `{:user {:repl-options {:prompt (fn [ns] (str "\033[1;32m" ns "=>" "\033[0m "))}}}` – Shaun Lebron Mar 23 '14 at 12:04
When adding this to `~/.lein/profiles.clj`, put the config within the `:repl` profile, instead of `:user`. So the structure is `{:repl {:repl-options {:prompt …}}}`. This ensures the config is only defined for `lein repl`, not for other subcommands like `lein test`. – Rory O'Kane Nov 30 '15 at 07:21

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 29 '11 at 20:06

5

Install Emacs 24
Install Emacs Starter Kit v2
M-x package-install -> starter-kit-lisp
Add to init.el: (add-hook 'slime-repl-mode-hook 'clojure-mode-font-lock-setup)
Install Swank for Clojure
Open your Clojure project and M-x clojure-jack-in

Emacs REPL

answered Sep 29 '11 at 20:06

Sridhar Ratnakumar

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this should be updated to use https://github.com/kingtim/nrepl.el instead of swank-clojure – 0x89 May 13 '13 at 15:19

dansalmo · Answer 5 · 2013-05-13T18:32:13.827

2

Try out Light Table Playground by Chris Granger. It is the first part of more ambitous multi language IDE.

It has a color Clojure REPL that does real time evaluations and display for entire blocks of code.

http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/

You can see a higher level view of the project here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

edited May 13 '13 at 18:32

answered Jul 25 '12 at 15:39

dansalmo

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Great project, but sadly inactive now – user16973 Apr 19 '21 at 06:56

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 09 '14 at 12:52

2

CIDER users can obtain a coloured REPL by adding the following to their config:

(setq cider-repl-use-clojure-font-lock t)

answered Jun 09 '14 at 12:52

Bozhidar Batsov

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score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:01

2

Some coloring have REPL in VimClojure.

answered Mar 19 '10 at 05:01

Sergey Miryanov

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score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Feb 05 '15 at 09:34

1

If you're an Intellij user, the excellent Cursive is a great choice, and provides pretty colours that you can customise:

enter image description here

answered Feb 05 '15 at 09:34

Conan

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score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Jul 14 '11 at 12:48

1

The Eclipse Counterclockwise REPL provides full syntax colouring (including rainbow bracket colouring).

I believe it uses nREPL under the hood.

answered Jul 14 '11 at 12:48

mikera

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Yes it exactly uses nRepl but employs a custom coloring strategy that of course can be configured (contributor@here) – Andrea Richiardi Sep 09 '15 at 16:03

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Aug 30 '14 at 21:53

0

To get your REPL output colorized try repl-color

enter image description here

answered Aug 30 '14 at 21:53

Vlad Bokov

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score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Feb 05 '15 at 13:09

0

You can try LightTable, it lets you select the functions and run instantly.

answered Feb 05 '15 at 13:09

Vinoth Kumar Asaithambi

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Is there a colored REPL for Clojure?

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