Easel Turns One One year of building my own IDE in Clojure (blog.phronemophobic.com)

Hey, this is absolutely amazing

This sounds very close to my dream IDE, I've always wanted to build a smalltalk + emacs like editor/ide in Clojure but never got around to it.

I wanted to try Easel but there were no instructions how. This is how I got it running:

  git clone git@github.com:phronmophobic/easel.git
  clj -X:deps prep
  clj
  # now in repl
  => ((requiring-resolve 'com.phronemophobic.easel/run))

Amazing project!

>While the JVM solves lots of hard problems, it has one major weakness, the UI libraries provided by the JVM (Swing and JavaFX) are clunky and dated.

I also feel this; it's what puts me off writing GUI apps in Clojure. I have hope that natively compiled Clojure implementations like Jank that could interact with C or C++ libraries could help with this.

Awesome work! I like the idea of being able to quickly make little tools in your IDE.

Coincidentally, lately I have been thinking of making an IDE using something like Theia or CodeMirror but am holding off because of time for my other projects.

This is really cool, but begs the question: is the ideal IDE actually just a window manager with strong component coupling?

Excellent work. Now please partner with a software-focused UI/UX designer. To make a great product it takes a village.

A bunch of this stuff is already there in Windows and in Visual Studio. It has been for decades.

But it’s legacy tech. Nobody actually cares about IPC to this degree. I suspect because nobody’s mental model works to this level of abstraction and who the hell is going to waste time doing all the plumbing.

Kudos for suffering on JVM I guess. Some people have a higher pain threshold.

Ideal IDE? As long as I have a reflow oven I’m not complaining.

The words data and data oriented are thrown around a lot in the article. Can someone explain what is meant, exactly, and why existing IDEs miss the mark?