CIDER (and nREPL by association) and clojure-lsp are often seen as competitors when it comes to Clojure development tools. You can find plenty of discussions online discussing the merits of both tools and their approaches.1 There are two common problems they I’ve noticed: People tend to conflate the specific clojure-lsp implementation and it’s approach based on static code analysis with LSP in general. In the end they attribute to LSP some attributes that are not related to the protocol. E.g. you can totally implement a Clojure LSP server in terms of code evaluation (perhaps by using nREPL internally). People tend to believe it’s a choice of one or the other tool, while in reality they work reasonably well in combination. Nobody’s perfect, though, and CIDER and clojure-lsp have their strengths and their weaknesses. The Case for clojure-lsp Disclaimer: I never really used clojure-lsp, so I might be missing something. It doesn’t require you to have a running a REPL It operates on your entire codebase, not just the parts that are currently loaded (which makes it shine in areas like “find references” and refactorings across multiple source files) If you’re already using lsp-mode or eglot you don’t have to learn anything new to work with Clojure Out of those benefits - only the last one is something we can attribute to the use of LSP, and I guess that the static analysis part of the clojure-lsp codebase is quite usable even without LSP. The Case for CIDER Powered by a the classic REPL-driven Lisp approach The information it obtains from the Clojure runtime is guaranteed to be accurate All of CIDER’s functionality is optimized for Clojure, as it’s not restrained by the LSP protocol In a nutshell, CIDER is an embodiment of the concept of interactive programming (a.k.a. REPL-driven programming). I grew fascinated by it when I started to use Emacs and subsequently SLIME for Common Lisp programming, and those tools are the direct inspiration for CIDER. Now that I’m quite used to this style of programming for me it feels like the most natural thing in the world. I’ll admit, though, that coming to it from Java and IntelliJ IDEA definitely wasn’t easy and I was originally quite confused by many of the concepts that were new to me. Making them work together In general I think that clojure-lsp is the clear winner until you decide to start a Clojure REPL. If you’re the type of person who likes to work without a REPL you’ll definitely appreciate clojure-lsp. Perhaps you can even get away without using something like CIDER at all, but at least for me - the big feature of Lisp is interactive programming, so I can’t imagine anyone programming with a REPL. Once a REPL is up and running things become a lot more dicey. Why so? Because both tools provide some similar functionality (e.g. completions, eldoc, find references, etc) and you’ll have to spend some time on the configuration to decide what to use. CIDER could have suppressed all the lsp-mode/eglot provided features when active and they could have done the same, but that’s not the spirit of Emacs, right?2 That’s why I believe it should be up to the end users to decide which features they want to leverage from both tools. lsp-mode already provides a lot of documentation on the topic, and I guess it’d be nice if CIDER had more coverage as well. That’s definitely something I plan to work on, but contributions are always welcome. Epilogue I think that in the end of the day what’s the right tool for someone really depends on their preferences and their style of programming. I’ve been programming in Lisps for almost 20 years and I grew super accustomed to the REPL-driven style of programming, so I don’t mind its limitations much.3 That being said I can definitely see the benefit of using something like clojure-lsp alongside CIDER and might try it down the road, and I’ll keep working towards making CIDER play better with clojure-lsp. Keep hacking! E.g. this one ↩ See https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/16/why-emacs-redux/. ↩ Even if I spent most of my early professional career programming in C, C++ and Java. ↩

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A comparison between CIDER and clojure-lsp for Clojure development, highlighting the common problems and the benefits of each tool.

CIDER & clojure-lsp Sitting on a Tree