Calva bundles a ”backup” way of starting Clojure with the help of deps.clj. You can check in the VS Code development console for messages about this and see if it falls back in this or not.

Depending on how you start Emacs it might or might not have the correct PATH. If you start it from terminal where you know you can run the clojure command, CIDER should find it too.

Thanks @U0ETXRFEW. I'll investigate. I'm not that committed to getting this fixed (because Calva is great :face_with_cowboy_hat: ) but I do like Emacs, too.

> I modified that variable what does this mean?

in my .emacs file I put "/usr/local/bin/clojure" in the exec-path` list

my ELisp skills are very poor though, so I'm guessing I screwed something up

i don’t think it wants executables on exec-path but paths on the exec path. just like your PATH variable i na shell

what are the other values in that list?

for example, a few of mine are

"/Users/dan/bin/" "/opt/homebrew/bin/" "/opt/homebrew/sbin/"

> List of directories to search programs to run in subprocesses. > Each element is a string (directory name) or nil (try default directory).

yeah I'm noticing that the other executables (eg. Cargo and Node) have the form of /cargo/bin and /node/bin and not the other way around

those aren’t executables

those are directories containing lots of executables

should Emacs be looking for clj or for clojure because they are both co-located on my machine

emacs will look for whatever program it needs to. All it needs are places to look for programs

so give it "/usr/local/bin/"

but by default CIDER will look for clojure (as clj is the same thing essentially but with rlwrap included for niceties like backspacing and pressing up for history)

I had that in there already, restarted Emacs but no change

open up an eshell window with m-x eshell and type which clojure

if that can’t find it you won’t be able to start. Emacs is still unable to find clojure. Can you post the value of exec-path?

'(exec-path
   '("/app/bin" "/usr/bin" "/usr/local/bin/"  "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/node/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/cargo/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/python/bin" "/app/libexec/emacs/28.1/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"))

what is that?

yeah which clojure in eshell is looking in the app/bin directories

why is it quoted and prefixed with exec-path?

when I was looking up how to do this it showed this form on EmacsWiki

yeah nvm I'm conflating things, this is not on EmacsWiki

should I be using the setq exec-path form instead?

i’m completely lost. can you tell me what the value of exec-path is currently?

m-x describe-variable [ret] exec-path

let’s find out what the value currently is first

same as the quoted list above

for me it is

exec-path is a variable defined in 'C source code'.

Its value is
("/Users/dan/.nvm/versions/node/v17.9.1/bin/" "/Users/dan/.sdkman/candidates/java/current/bin/" "/Users/dan/bin/" "/opt/homebrew/bin/" "/opt/homebrew/sbin/" "/usr/local/bin/" "/usr/bin/" "/bin/" "/usr/sbin/" "/sbin/" "/opt/homebrew/Cellar/emacs-mac/emacs-28.1-mac-9.0/libexec/emacs/28.1/aarch64-apple-darwin21.5.0/")
Original value was 
("/Users/dan/.nvm/versions/node/v17.9.1/bin" "/Users/dan/.sdkman/candidates/java/current/bin" "/Users/dan/bin" "/opt/homebrew/bin" "/opt/homebrew/sbin" "/usr/local/bin" "/usr/bin" "/bin" "/usr/sbin" "/sbin" "/opt/homebrew/Cellar/emacs-mac/emacs-28.1-mac-9.0/libexec/emacs/28.1/aarch64-apple-darwin21.5.0")

exec-path is a variable defined in 'C source code'.

Its value is
("/app/bin" "/usr/bin" "/usr/local/bin/" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/node/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/cargo/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/python/bin" "/app/libexec/emacs/28.1/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu")
Original value was 
("/app/bin" "/usr/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/node/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/cargo/bin" "/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/python/bin" "/app/libexec/emacs/28.2/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu")

ok. that looks great. now we know that value is being set correctly. and in an eshell buffer what is the output of which clojure?

~/Documents/clojure/scratch $ which clojure
which: no clojure in (/app/bin:/usr/bin:/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/node/bin:/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/cargo/bin:/home/slothrop/.var/app/org.gnu.emacs/data/python/bin)

ok i have a theory: emacs doesn’t have permissions to look at /usr/local/bin ? Open up a dired buffer and navigate to that folder. See if emacs can see it

you are correct

i’m guessing perhaps that’s why it is not looking in there?

/usr/local/bin is inaccessible or nonexistent

ok. what do you get from a terminal ls /usr/local/bin?

slothrop@pop-os:/usr/local/bin$ ls
aws  aws_completer  bb  clj  clojure  corepack  ng  node  npm  npx

ok. so there’s some permissions thing. i’m not sure

everything is configured correctly at the emacs level. just can’t see that directory

so this really has nothing to do with Emacs in particular then?

doesn’t sound like it. the executable is there. But emacs cannot see the directory /usr/local/bin.

this is my personal machine so I can change whatever I want

“is inaccessible or nonexistent”

I'll have to explore this. I suspect this was not an issue on WSL bc I was launching Emacs from the terminal, as opposed to now launching it from the desktop. Thanks for your help @U11BV7MTK