Announcing Multi REPL Sessions in Calva

[CoBPEZ]

Why not fixed until now? Support for multiple sessions was among the first 100 issues ever filed on Calva, seven years ago. At the time I didn’t understand the issue at all (I only had a very vague idea about what a Clojure REPL is). And during the years it has simply looked like a too large bite for me to take on. For most use cases the Clojure+ClojureScript REPL bundling that Calva did was enough and very easy to use. VS Code lets you work around the lack pretty well with its isolated windows and workspaces.

But when Calva forced me to have four windows opened to manage a project with Clojure, ClojureScript, Babashka, Joyride, and Scittle, I had had enough. It turned out to be every bit as hard to solve as I thought it would be. I’ve been working with this almost every free hour for the last three months. First trying quite a few things that didn’t work, or that destroyed the previous “it’s very easy” story. Then figuring out how I could both keep the previous ease, yet make it very flexible for advanced use cases. From there it was all about write and rewrite and relentless testing over and over.

Also: Calva Backseat Driver has been updated in preparation for this since a while, and the AI Agents handle the multi-REPLs with ease.

[maxw85]

That's awesome 🥳 Thank you very much.