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I've been using Parinfer with IntelliJ (Cursive) ever since I started developing Clojure professionally back in 2018. The best thing about Parinfer, or at least

I've been using Parinfer with IntelliJ (Cursive) ever since I started developing Clojure professionally back in 2018. The best thing about Parinfer, or at least the implementation in Cursive, is that it doesn't preclude you from also mixing in some Paredit commands too. When you start out with Clojure/Lisp and you aren't totally used to parenthesis you can just use Parinfer to get editor behaviour similar to developing Python. It removes a major pain point of migrating to a Lisp. It used to be the case that you were forced to learn Paredit pretty much from the start.

kevinmershon 2y ago
Your comment about how it makes editing flow like python is spot on, and I've been saying this for years. I'm a long time parinfer-rust user in spacemacs, and it makes me very happy. However it also made me very strict and opinionated about formatting. One of the main downsides of parinfer comes when you have to interact with someone else's poorly indented or opinionated (wrongly) formatting that goes against the clojure style guide. Parinfer can then ruin otherwise working code because things are out of alignment. To fix this, I set up a function to force format files on open, which mostly works but then for the longest time made me the source of a lot of white space commits. It also struggles with egregiously long files. Thankfully I eventually got my team on board with force formatting all files and treating non standard formatting as linting errors. We also cut down the largest files one of the other devs made, and that helped a lot.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
> It used to be the case that you were forced to learn Paredit pretty much from the start. I started part-time in Clojure in 2011 and full-time in 2014. I've never felt like I needed any extra tooling for parens. Instead of typing `foo(x)`, I type `(foo x)`. It seems...almost exactly the same to me. Same with text editors: people will say you need emacs, Cursive, etc. but I just use vim for Clojure, as well as everything else. It works great.
- simongray 2y ago
  I guess you are one of the lucky ones who writes everything correctly the first time around. I tend to move around parens quite a lot while developing, constantly refactoring, so some kind of structural editing was necessary for me from the get-go.
slifin 2y ago
If you're a vim key bind user the main vim plugin for IntelliJ works well with Cursive's parinfer implementation When I tried this in vscode it was problematic

kevinmershon 2y ago

Your comment about how it makes editing flow like python is spot on, and I've been saying this for years. I'm a long time parinfer-rust user in spacemacs, and it makes me very happy. However it also made me very strict and opinionated about formatting. One of the main downsides of parinfer comes when you have to interact with someone else's poorly indented or opinionated (wrongly) formatting that goes against the clojure style guide. Parinfer can then ruin otherwise working code because things are out of alignment. To fix this, I set up a function to force format files on open, which mostly works but then for the longest time made me the source of a lot of white space commits. It also struggles with egregiously long files. Thankfully I eventually got my team on board with force formatting all files and treating non standard formatting as linting errors. We also cut down the largest files one of the other devs made, and that helped a lot.

ARandomerDude 2y ago

> It used to be the case that you were forced to learn Paredit pretty much from the start. I started part-time in Clojure in 2011 and full-time in 2014. I've never felt like I needed any extra tooling for parens. Instead of typing `foo(x)`, I type `(foo x)`. It seems...almost exactly the same to me. Same with text editors: people will say you need emacs, Cursive, etc. but I just use vim for Clojure, as well as everything else. It works great.

simongray 2y ago
I guess you are one of the lucky ones who writes everything correctly the first time around. I tend to move around parens quite a lot while developing, constantly refactoring, so some kind of structural editing was necessary for me from the get-go.

slifin 2y ago

If you're a vim key bind user the main vim plugin for IntelliJ works well with Cursive's parinfer implementation When I tried this in vscode it was problematic