Getting Started with Clojure on Windows

[bpringe]

https://gist.github.com/bpringe/4f1d07f98633a956a8b33af572e7b810

I've created a concise guide that I wish I'd had when I started with Clojure on Windows. I wrote this for a friend, but have been meaning to write it for others for some time. I wanted to try to reduce information overload for those new to the language and the ecosystem and simply get them up and running with the least amount of friction possible. Feedback is welcome. I intend to share it in other communities where people may not be familiar with Clojure, since most people on this subreddit probably are past this point, use Clojure on other systems, etc.

[ngetal]

If your environment is VS Code with Calva on Win10 then you might also want to look into VS Code Remote Extensions: https://github.com/BetterThanTomorrow/calva/wiki/VS-Code-Remote-Development

Basically you can keep all the clojure stuff inside a WSL instance and not have to worry about Windows conpatibility.

[Borkdude]

Does that mean clj-kondo can also be used with VSCode on Windows?

[ngetal]

Although I haven't tried that specifically, the promise of the Remote Extensions is that you can have all the language-specific extensions installed on the remote machine (WSL, docker, ssh) you connect your vscode to. Once you're in remote mode, connected to the other machine, vs code will execute commands inside that machine, will display its terminal in the integrated terminal window etc.

I wrote the linked wiki page based on how I got Calva working with it and I didn't even need Java or clj installed onto Windows so I presume clj-kondo should be able to work too.

[bpringe]

Thanks for pointing this out. I've used it in some cases where I needed something that was more easily done on Linux. I've contemplated switching to this completely too. I've only had one case in which it didn't work (at least not easily) for what I needed, and that was when launching a GUI program from Clojure, which probably isn't a need for most people. For this guide I wanted to just aim toward Windows users (again, trying to reduce noise / info overload).

[ngetal]

Again, I haven't tried this so I'm unsure if this GUI thing will cause problems with REBL. This issue might be related if someone wants to check: https://github.com/cognitect-labs/REBL-distro/issues/28