Easel Turns One One Year of Building My Own Ide in Clojure

https://github.com/humbleui/humbleui

Most of the work (and the recent updates) seem to be in the two main subcomponents

https://github.com/HumbleUI/JWM

https://github.com/HumbleUI/Skija

i made a GUI with cljfx which uses JavaFX and I didnt really hit any issues (save for i have one bug on startup that ive had trouble ironing out). The app is snappy and feels as native as anything else

Ended with a very modular functional GUI program

the only thing i wasnt super happy about is that i couldnt package it as a simple .bin/.exe bc the jpackage system forces you into making an installer/application (its been a few years since, so its possible theres a graal native solution now)

i highly recommend cljfx. Its the opposite of clunky

Where tools are dependencies and the system composes them together to create a sum much greater than the parts.

I keep telling myself that if everyone just used tmux or a good emulator they could manage the tabs and layouts, but then I tell myself I just want this to be a tiling window manager as an distraction free OS for development, give me nothing but a terminal and an assistant.

> why existing IDEs miss the mark? There are definitely lots of IDEs that do cool things, but are missing one or more items from my wish list.

With respect to data orientation, most IDEs don't represent information as immutable data. If all internal state uses immutable data, it's much easier and safer to share. If everything is mutable, then sharing data is hard, which why most IDEs don't have pervasive sharing. As an example of an IDE that does provide access to data pervasively, but makes very different trade-offs than Easel, see https://gtoolkit.com/.

Using an IDE where all the tools take data and share data has dramatically changed my workflow. You can sort of get this feeling when you pipe together a bunch of shell commands `find ... | grep ... | tee ... | nc ... | etc...`. However, I think 1) sharing data rather than strings and 2) having a 2D graphical user interface is a big upgrade from piping shell commands.

So it must have tools save, manipulate and visualize conveniently (pretty printing, folding etc) the values of vars that contain nested maps, sequences, sets, etc.

Existing clojure IDEs like CIDER for emacs or Calva for VSCode do that too, and it is a must have to have a nice experience with the language