CIDER is a popular Clojure programming environment for Emacs.

In a nutshell - CIDER extends Emacs with support for interactive programming in Clojure. The features are centered around cider-mode, an Emacs minor-mode that complements clojure-mode. While clojure-mode supports editing Clojure source files, cider-mode adds support for interacting with a running Clojure process for compilation, debugging, definition and documentation lookup, running tests and so on.

You can safely think of CIDER as SLIME (a legendary Common Lisp programming environment) for Clojure - after all SLIME was the principle inspiration for CIDER to begin with. If you’re interested in some historical background you can check out my talk on the subject The Evolution of the Emacs tooling for Clojure.

Many people who are new to Lisps (and Emacs) really struggle with the concept of “interactive programming” and are often asking what’s the easiest (and fastest) way to “grok” (understand) it.

While CIDER has an extensive manual and a section on interactive programming there, it seems for most people that’s not enough to get a clear understanding of interactive programming fundamentals and appreciate its advantages.

I always felt what CIDER needed were more video tutorials on the subject, but for one reason or another I never found the time to produce any. In the past this amazing intro to SLIME really changed my perception of SLIME and got me from 0 to 80 in like one hour. I wanted to do the same for CIDER users! And I accidentally did this in a way last year - at a FP conference I was attending to present CIDER, one of the speakers dropped out, and I was invited to fill in for them with a hands-on session on CIDER. It was officially named Deep Dive into CIDER, but probably “Intro to CIDER” would have been a more appropriate name, and it’s likely the best video introduction to CIDER around today. It’s certainly not my finest piece of work, and I definitely have to revisit the idea for proper high-quality tutorials in the future, but it’s better than nothing. I hope at least some of you would find it useful!

You might also find some of the additional CIDER resources mentioned in the manual helpful.

Enjoy!