Emacs Lisp: Font Lock for Clojure's Partial

I love using partial, but I dislike the length of the function name. There's a simple solution, define another function with a shorter name that simply calls (or is) partial. This is exactly what I did in the jry library.

I liked the use of % due to partial feeling similar to creating a function using #(), and % having a special meaning inside #(). I thought they tied well together. Unfortunately, there's an obvious problem, things would be very broken if you tried to use the '%' function in an anonymous function defined with #(). Somewhere along the way this issue caused me to stop using jry/%.

Using partial is great: it's part of the standard lib, and I don't need to explain it to anyone who joins my team or any future maintainers of the code I write. Still, I want something shorter, and I've always had a background thread looking for another shorter-than-partial solution. While recently contributing to emacs-live I found the solution I was looking for: clojure-mode font lock.

The following code can now be found in my emacs configuration.

This solution feels like the best of both worlds. My code still uses the function from the standard library, my colleagues still see a function they already know, and 'partial' only takes up one character space in my buffer. The image below is what you'll see if you put the above emacs-lisp in your config.

Emacs Lisp: Toggle Between a Clojure String and Keyword

When I was doing a fair bit of Ruby I often used the TextMate's shortcut (Ctrl+:) to convert a Ruby String to a Symbol or a Ruby Symbol to a String. It's something I've periodically missed while doing Clojure, and yesterday I found myself in the middle of a refactoring that was going to force the conversion of 5+ Clojure Keywords to Strings.

The following emacs lisp is my solution for toggling between Clojure Strings and Keywords. The standard disclaimers apply - it works on my machine, and I've never claimed to know emacs lisp well.

A quick video of the behavior:

Emacs Lisp: Find Java Sources

Confession: I really hope someone can tell me I'm doing this wrong. I can't believe there isn't an easier way.

I work with Clojure, in Emacs, almost every day. Navigating the source is usually fairly easy. If I want to navigate to a function definition, all I need to press is M-., and if I want to navigate back, M-, does the trick. This works for Clojure that I've written, as well as Clojure that lives in the libraries that I reference. That's fine the vast majority of the time, but occasionally I need to navigate to the Java source of some library I'm using. This is where I can't believe that no one else has solved this problem.* If I'm in a clj file, my cursor is on a Java class, I don't know of any way to easily navigate to the class definition.

Context: I use fig for dependency management (at work). I have my projects set to put sources in ./the-project/lib/sources; therefore, the following solution assumes the sources are in that directory. If you use Lein (for deps), I'm sure the sources are on your local drive somewhere. All you need to do is change the lisp below to point to your source dir.

Additionally, I use Lein, so I have a project.clj at the root of my project; however, there's nothing special or required about "project.clj". You could just as easily put a this.is.a.project.root file in the root of your project, and search for that file.

The following code will search the your source jars for a Java class, and open the first match that it finds (or no match, if no match is found)

disclaimer, I'm still an emacs lisp beginner.

The previous code is pretty straightforward. Line 3 uses expand region to mark whatever Java class my cursor is currently on or near. You could type the word instead if you like, this page should help you understand how.
Line 4 and 6 find and verify where the project root lives.
Line 8 (and 9) greps for a string (the Java class) in a directory (my source dir).
Line 10 switches to the grep results.
Line 11 sleeps, waiting for the grep results to return.
Line 12 searches forward, looking for the first match.
Line 13 opens the jar of the first match.
Line 14 assigns the current point to a var named 'current-point'.
Line 15 searches forward to the end of the jar name.
Line 16 grabs the name of the jar and switches to that buffer.
Line 17 searches the jar's dired buffer for the name of the class.
Line 18 opens the first class name match.
(Line 19 lets you know if your project root could not be determined)

That's it, you can now easily find java source (with the occasional conflicting name annoyance). It's not pretty, but it gets the job done.

* I've been told that a few Java modes are good, if I can easily use those to navigate from my Clojure to Java, please leave a link to a manual I can dig into. I assume there are etags solutions, but it's not clear what the best way to go is. I'm sure there's an easy solution for navigating Java from Clojure, I'm just having a hard time finding it.

Elisp: Duplicate Line

After switching to emacs I quickly noticed that I was missing a simple keystroke for duplicating a line. Yes, I know it's as easy as C-a, C-k, C-y, Enter, C-y. Still, I wanted a keystroke. So, I coded up the following snippet. It's similar to what you'd find elsewhere on the net, but it also moves the cursor to where I've gotten used to it ending up.

Elisp: Automated Switching Between Clojure Test and Source Files

The majority of the work that I do in emacs is Clojure programming. The Clojure navigation support (M-.) is usually all I need, but one thing that I find myself doing manually fairly often is jumping between tests and source. After suffering manual navigation for a few days, I finally automated the task using the Elisp from this blog entry.

All of my Clojure projects use both Leiningen and expectations; therefore, my directory structures always look similar to what you see below.

source - /Users/jfields/src/project-name/src/clojure/
tests - /Users/jfields/src/project-name/test/clojure/expectations/

Since my projects follow this convention, I'm able to make several assumptions about where the expectations and where the source will actually live. If you don't use expectations, or you follow a slightly different directory structure, you'll want to hack this a bit to follow your conventions.

If you're in a source file, find (and open) the expectations.


If you're in a test file, find (and open) the source.

Elisp: Grep in Clojure Project

Grep'ing within my current project is something I do frequently. It's not much to type, but I do it often enough that I was looking for a keystroke. Most of my projects are Clojure and use Leiningen, thus I'm able to make some pretty safe assumptions. The following snippets allow you to easily grep within your project.

note: both use expand-region to grab the clojure that the cursor is on or immediately after, and grep for whatever was selected.

grep recursively starting at the directory where the project.clj file lives

grep recursively, but allow the user to select the root directory (defaulting to the location of the project.clj file). I often use this one for selecting only the src or test directories of my project.

emacs lisp: removing a lamba hook

disclaimer: I know almost nothing about emacs lisp, so please forgive any mistakes or incorrect assumptions.

I've been using Clojure for over 4 years at this point, but it's generally been on projects that are mostly Java with a few small components in Clojure. Given that context my teammates preferred that we stick with IntelliJ; however, things have recently changed and the emacs journey has begun.

Taking emacs from 'factory settings' to 'impressive' for me was as easy as getting started with emacs-live.

Emacs Live can be summarized as:

a nice structured approach to organising your Emacs config

modular in that functionality is organised by discrete packs

Indeed, Emacs Live does structure your config nicely; however, in it's own words: Emacs Live is also an opinionated set of defaults. I like all of the defaults... except one: rainbow-delimiters

I get that people like rainbow-delimeters, and I would never try to convince you not to use them - they're just not for me, and I needed to find out how to get rid of them.

Emacs Live adds rainbow-delimiters in two different ways. The following code shows how Emacs Live uses add-hook to enable rainbow delimiters for scheme, emacs-lisp, & lisp.

(dolist (x '(scheme emacs-lisp lisp))
  (add-hook 
    (intern (concat (symbol-name x) "-mode-hook"))
    'rainbow-delimiters-mode))

The code required to remove rainbow-delimiters from scheme, emacs-lisp, & lisp is very straightforward, and can be found below.

(dolist (x '(scheme emacs-lisp lisp))
  (remove-hook 
    (intern (concat (symbol-name x) "-mode-hook"))
    'rainbow-delimiters-mode))

As you can see, replacing add-hook with remove-hook will remove the hook that Emacs Live added for me. Since Emacs Live loads my personal settings last, my remove should successfully work every time. It's a best practice that you create hooks that can be run in any order - and this change is obviously order specific; however, I can't think of a way to follow the hook best practice without hacking the emacs-live checkout. Therefore, it seems like this solution is the most pragmatic.

The next snippet of code is how Emacs Live adds rainbow delimiters (& a few other things) to clojure-mode.

(add-hook 'clojure-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (enable-paredit-mode)
            (rainbow-delimiters-mode)
            (add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-yasnippet)
            (setq buffer-save-without-query t)))

The previous hook was easy to remove, since I knew exactly what function I needed to remove. This hook is more of a problem, since it's anonymous. Additionally, this function is defined within Emacs Live code, so simply changing it to a named function isn't an option (since I don't want to modify the emacs-live checkout).

Finding a solution wasn't very hard. The first thing I did was try to get a list of the functions that will be fired by the hook. This is as simple as printing, as the following code shows.

(print clojure-mode-hook)

I put that simple print statement in my .emacs-live.el, restarted emacs, went to the *Messages* buffer, and found the following line printed out.

((lambda nil 
         (enable-paredit-mode)
         (rainbow-delimiters-mode)
         (add-to-list (quote ac-sources) (quote ac-source-yasnippet)) 
         (setq buffer-save-without-query t)))

As you can see, clojure-mode-hook has a list of the functions that have been added via add-hook. With this information, I added the following code, which first removes the existing hook and then adds a new anonymous function with everything previously specified - sans rainbow-delimiters.

(remove-hook 'clojure-mode-hook (first clojure-mode-hook))

(add-hook 'clojure-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (enable-paredit-mode)
            (add-to-list 'ac-sources 'ac-source-yasnippet)
            (setq buffer-save-without-query t)))

The above snippet removes my unwanted lambda hook and adds a new hook with everything I do want.

Is this fragile? You bet. If things change in Emacs Live, I'll need to mirror those changes in my .emacs-live.el - which is why it's recommended that you don't rely on ordering when adding and removing hooks. However, given the situation, this seems like a pragmatic solution.

Feedback definitely welcome.