It has been suggested before, but so far at least I have deemed the extra aliases to be enough. As you note, it could get a pretty crazy list.

Fair enough.

We should add this functionality, imo.

It might be that when I’m done implementing the custom command line for Jack-in, that this is easy enough to achieve that way. So my support for the idea is general for now. It’ll depend on the definition of “easy”. 😀

The real trick here is that such middleware would be conditional, based on what's on the classpath - which is why I wrote my own repl-starting main function. But if the mechanism allows both extra deps and extra middleware args to be specified, that would work.

I’m not following completely. What stops this from working today?

Because if an alias includes main opts then the -M -m stuff Calva adds is passed as additional arguments to whatever main the alias invokes, and does not invoke the nREPL cmdline.

Oh, I thought Calva wouldn’t invoke its main opts if an alias declares this. Sounds like a bug.

When I try it, Calva does not any -m stuff if I select an alias with main-opts.

For now I’ll add some docs about this, reword the warning a bit and make it point to the docs. Since this does not address your use case, please let me know if there is something you think could be done to support it.

The docs:

Ah, that clarifies how it works (which wasn't quite how I thought it worked, so thank you!)... the only "wrinkle" is that :main-opts are last-one-wins so you can control that by ordering things on the command-line but Calva adds the aliases in strictly alphabetical order. If I have a project where I can run clojure -M:test, I'm likely doing that by having :main-opts in :test to specify how to run the test runner. So I can't select :test as an alias when jacking-in because it doesn't start a REPL. My alias for starting a REPL is :dev/repl -- so even if I also check that, Calva invokes clojure -Sdeps '...' -M:dev/repl:test and so that runs the tests but does not start a REPL. From the command-line I would run clojure -M:test:dev/repl and get a REPL (with tests available). So what Calva needs here is some way to select which :main-opts-bearing alias should come last so that it "wins" and therefore can be used to start a REPL. That wouldn't help with the case of just checking :test tho'...

One thing Calva could do is: • add :aliases in the -Sdeps with, say, :calva/cider-nrepl that has the :main-opts Calva would add (`-m nrepl.cmd-line --middleware [..]`) • add :calva/cider-nrepl by default as an alias at the end of the selected alias list • unless the user selected a different alias to be the last one, whose :main-opts should win Which is a bit of a complicated UX but is very flexible...

That way clojure -Sdeps '...' -M:test:calva/cider-nrepl would work, but also a user could select a different "last alias" and do clojure -Sdeps '...' -M:test:dev/repl for example...

(I ran into this with HoneySQL that assumes last-one-wins in the tasks it runs in build.clj -- which fetches :main-opts from the selected aliases when running tasks -- but has :main-opts in :test for the simple command-line case too)

Thanks! Let’s ponder this and see if we come up with a way to specify this.

I’m intending to play around with 1.12 Alpha 2 today.

That’s awesome. I think there’s a pattern here that we can build in to Calva.