You can set calva.autoOpenREPLWindow to false.

I have that and a bunch of other Calva settings in my https://github.com/seancorfield/vscode-calva-setup/blob/develop/settings.json

It's fantastic to hear you could use it for this long! And a bit sad. Means I was so, so close to figuring it out. It's like I was swimming towards land for miles and miles and then sunk just by the shore.

It's interesting what you say about some autoformatting in VS Code starting to do stuff. We have a recent https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/CBE668G4R/p1675855895843909 that I am unable to wrap my head around. Maybe it has started with a recent VS Code... @U02CX2V8PJN, can you try repro with an old VS Code? Something from late last year should be enough old.

As for the radar. Until you told me this, @URLHASEM6, Parinfer in Calva was off my radar. But now I think we actually need to find the root causes to why it messed things up even for users that didn't enable Parinfer. And once we have found that cause and fixed it, the road should be paved for Parinfer again. No commitment here though, but I know myself and how dying on some hill is something I can see myself doing.

Saw the other issue too and wondered if it could be related somehow.

Have you tried with older VS Code, @URLHASEM6?

Not yet, but will once I figure out how to go back a version. 🙂

It's pretty easy: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates

You see the download links there at the start of the page.

Yes, downgraded VS Code in Aptitude, which solved the problem. Thanks anyway @U0ETXRFEW! I clearly remember how hard you tried last time around. It is clear to me that VS Code is not exactly helpful in this respect. (Parinfer does not seem at all urgent for most Clojure developers. It's just that to me paredit barfing and slurping never comes close to the immediacy I experience when parinfer allows me to not have to think at that level. 🙂 And therefore, it indeed seems a desirable entry point to have for beginners.)

To me Parinfer seems a bit dangerous for beginners. But I could be tainted by my bug-ridden implementation.

Interesting. Yes, I can see that too. I do sometimes need to make an effort to figure out what went wrong in my code, perhaps a bit less so in other editors that support it well. 😉 Still, much easier for me to get used to than not having it though. (I'm sure that my Python background has a lot to do with naturally expressing intent through indenting. 🙂)

I am beginner enough to clearly remember that, initially, even auto-formatting and bracket-management could frequently be disorienting. And those are both way more straightforward. Personally Parinfer doesn't fit my taste at all. But if it did, I would still strongly avoid directing beginners to it. Feel out the language as it actually is first.

Just read your question to try with an older vscode. Will do!

Well that was more shittier then I thought, wanted to do it in a sandbox. couldnt even get clojure-lsp to start. will try again later

It's probably trickier to do a separate install on Windows than on Mac. But if the installer gives you an option for install location, that should be enough sandbox, I think.

Tastes clearly differ. 'Feel out the language as it actually is first.' is fine for a few days, but I remember that editing as plain text was so painful that without structural editing support, with parinfer posing the lowest threshold w.r.t. where I came from, I really just wanted to run away.

Neither Paredit, nor Parinfer is the language anyway. It's two methods to manipulate the text.