lilactown / humble-starter

A starter project for developing desktop apps using HumbleUI

humble-starter

A commented, minimal example project to get you started with developing desktop apps using HumbleUI and Clojure.

Development

To simply run the app, execute ./script/run.sh.

To start a REPL (including a minimal nREPL server), you can run ./script/nrepl.sh

Reloading

To reload the app and see your changes reflected, you can:

1. Evaluate individual forms via the REPL, reset the state/*app atom, and then call state/redraw!
2. Make changes to the files, save them, then call reload from the user ns, which will use clojure.tools.namespace to detect which ns' should be refreshed, evaluate them, and then call state/redraw!.

CIDER

TL;DR: Customize the jack in command, delete the :cider/nrepl alias at the end of the command and replace it with :dev:cider

If you use an editor like Emacs or Calva which integrates using CIDER, you can customize the jack-in command to work with your HumbleUI app.

NOTE: The default jack-in command will not work, since we need to start the HumbleUI app on a different thread than the nREPL server. By default, the nREPL server will start and then you would evaluate commands via this connection, but this will not work when starting the HumbleUI app.

To ensure that you are loading the correct version of nREPL and CIDER, we start by running the jack-in command but customizing it. In Emacs, this is C-u M-x cider-jack-in. An example of what the default command looks like:

/opt/homebrew/bin/clojure -Sdeps '{:deps {nrepl/nrepl {:mvn/version "1.0.0"} cider/cider-nrepl {:mvn/version "0.28.6"}} :aliases {:cider/nrepl {:main-opts ["-m" "nrepl.cmdline" "--middleware" "[cider.nrepl/cider-middleware]"]}}}' -M:cider/nrepl

For our purposes, the user ns has a -main function which handles all of the app and nREPL server initialization. The only thing we need to replace the call to CIDER's main with our own and pass in the middlewares to it.

Below, we show the command after we delete the use of the :cider/nrepl alias and replace it with the :dev:cider alias configured in our deps.edn, which calls our custom -main function with the CIDER middlewares.

/opt/homebrew/bin/clojure -Sdeps '{:deps {nrepl/nrepl {:mvn/version "1.0.0"} cider/cider-nrepl {:mvn/version "0.28.6"}} :aliases {:cider/nrepl {:main-opts ["-m" "nrepl.cmdline" "--middleware" "[cider.nrepl/cider-middleware]"]}}}' -M:dev:cider

Credit

A lot of this code was copied and then modified from the HumbleUI codebase itself, as well as humble-deck and humble-animations. Thanks to @tonsky for developing HumbleUI and releasing so many cool examples, and @oakmac for showing me some cool stuff too!

License & Copyright

Licensed under MIT. Copyright Will Acton 2022.