An Emacs minor mode to make your Clojure code a little more fun, maybe more readable, and impossible to pair on.
You might hate this. Though a rare few may find joy. And doing it this way without ligatures shouldn't cause errors (see below).
Inspired by Malabarba's ground breaking post which also explains how to do the "interesting" spacing required.
The best way to try this is to just install it and open a bunch of
your .clj files in your Emacs with your own colors and fonts and
sizes and see what you think. There are many more symbolics than can
be shown here. Ideally, there would be hundreds, but it's challenging
to make them all obvious, so there are presently ~70.
NOTE: This is still a WIP.
Caption: Side-by-side before/after of several vars, macros, and functions shown in red and purple as special combo glyphs.
Put this in your vendor dir (as symlink to your clone maybe) or
wherever and require it.
(add-to-list 'load-path "path to your clone of this")
(require 'symbolic-clojure)This seems weird for just a little while. I wanted to try it and see what the adjustment would be like. I've found that it actually makes the code much more readable after you know the very repetitive symbols, which I think is really quick (though they are my own quirky conventions).
There is now a clean separation from clojure's own built-in character words and the vars that we create. The eye can now focuses solely on the creation, and it not distracted by a bunch of other "words". Crazy, but give it some thought.
The symbol representations were chosen slightly arbitrarily based on:
- mathematics conventions
- prior art
- APL
- some questionable creativity
-
λ:: traditional for functions; taken further forfn,defn, and#( -
ⅅ:: "domain", as inletis creating a scope/domain; all the*-letvariants are combined withⅅ -
»:: for end-quote makes quotes finally into a true pair; I tried„but they felt too much like commas. Would have made the opening quote a guillemet too, but couldn't get Emacs' cross-play with the face treatment to work -
⊨:: isdobecause it looks like a sequence of things -
∀:: this seems obviously fitting for "for(all)", but also combined it to makedoseqfeel very similar -
∧and∥:: forandandor; chose∥instead of∨to make them stand apart better; still deciding -
⊃,⊃⊃,⊃⊃⊃:: forwhenandifandcond; some of my favorites, clearly indicating thatwhenis a single branch, andifis two, andcondis many. -
§:: another fave, the "section marker", forns; just feels right, like a chapter! -
∞∞and↻↻::loopandrecur, since loop puts you into recursion withrecurbringing you back to the top. Considered some musical "segno" symbols, but this felt better; maybe should be three of them -
∘::comp, traditional -
◫:: forjuxt, looks like two boxes juxtaposed next to each other -
ℛandℐ:::requireand:import, just to be fancy
That's the most interesting for now (that aren't obvious), but hopefully more will come to light; feel free to suggest more ideas!
Formatters/checkers such as cljfmt and zprint expect your code to be indented properly. If you take the simple/naive approach to symbolic replacement, letting say a single-char symbol replace a two-char representation, Emacs (and maybe other integrated formatters) will indent with the assumption that your code is just a single char. E.g.,
(let [foo 1
bar 2])when replaced by a single character ⅅ, will indent the second line
insufficiently:
(ⅅ [foo 1
bar 2])That's what happens with vanilla prettify-symbols-mode, as shown
here. So
the trick this minor-mode accomplishes is to render it (arguably less
beautifully) as:
( ⅅ [foo 1
bar 2])