[lemming]

Cursive is based off a fork of La Clojure from a long time ago. Since then I've rewritten 80% of the code in Clojure and added a lot of new functionality and fixed a lot of bugs. There's lots of new stuff in there, but the main highlights are Paredit-style structural editing and good nREPL integration (for local and remote REPLs). Jan Thomä also kindly let me bundle the leiningen plugin so that's provided out of the box and I'll be making a lot of improvements to that over the next couple of weeks. All the beta testers have said it's a great improvement over La Clojure. Unfortunately La Clojure has never been a priority for JetBrains, which is what let me to start work on this a while back.

I'm planning to release this as a commercial PyCharm-style IDE, at a similar price point. I've done this in consultation with JetBrains, in case anyone's concerned about that.

Edit: some clarification.

[dljsjr]

Awesome. I've only been playing with Clojure for a few months but IntelliJ IDEA has been my go-to IDE for a long time now so all of that time has been spent with La Clojure + Leiningen plugin and I've always felt that it was a little clunky (and that the Leiningen plugin was a bit of a 2nd class citizen). Hopefully a little TLC and a cohesive vision can yield something that's much nicer to work with. Looking forward to seeing where this project ends up.

[sesm]

As far as I understand, Cursive will be available both as a plugin and as a standalone IDE, right? What will be the added value of standalone IDE? PyCharm is a subset of IDEA Ultimate + Python plugin, will it be the case with Cursive? In other words, does it make sense to buy Cursive IDE for users who already have IDEA Ultimate?

[lemming]

The standalone IDE will be useful for people getting started with Clojure, since it'll provide a more integrated experience - we bundle lein so that Windows developers don't need to download and install it to get going, for example (although this is currently not exposed to the user, coming soon). Clojure is great but the getting started experience is still not great for total newbies. I hope to provide a great environment that'll be basically a one-click download to get started.

It'll be similar to PyCharm in that the standalone IDE will be basically a cut-down Community edition plus the plugin, right, although it can be customised more heavily for Clojure if required. The licensing will be the same for the plugin and the IDE (i.e. your licence will work for both), so if you already own IntelliJ Ultimate it would make sense to stay with that. Unfortunately I don't have the luxury of offering the plugin free to IntelliJ Ultimate users as JetBrains can do with PyCharm.

[systems]

do you plan to go commercial, imminently i.e. as soon as you go out of beta and settle things down ... or is this just a future possibility?

[lemming]

Pretty much right away after the beta program, although I'm not sure how long that will be. Probably late this year sometime, but it depends on the problems people find.