neorepl: A Terminal REPL for Clojure (and Friends)

For more than a decade the Clojure REPL most people saw in a terminal was REPLy, the one behind lein repl. It served us well, but it’s showing its age, and I kept wishing for a terminal REPL that felt like CIDER, without the Emacs part. So I finally built one. neorepl 0.1 is out today! Why another REPL? There’s no shortage of Clojure REPLs, so it’s fair to ask. Here’s what I was after: nREPL all the way down. neorepl only speaks nREPL, so it works with anything that runs an nREPL server: Clojure, babashka, shadow-cljs, Basilisp, ClojureCLR and so on. The smarts live on the server. When cider-nrepl is there neorepl uses it, the same way CIDER does, and when it isn’t it falls back to nREPL’s built-in ops, and then to evaluating a bit of code. A REPL that’s pleasant to use: a proper line editor, highlighting, completion, arglists as you type, pretty printing, history per project and a Ctrl-C that actually interrupts the evaluation. A CLI that’s just as good for scripts and coding agents.…