How does your repl buffers die? I use C-s C-q which quits and kills the buffers.

I run the repl in a terminal and then connect to it from cider-connect. To terminate I simply interrupt the repl process inside the terminal.

Ideally disconnect Emacs Cider from the external REPL started in the terminal, before terminating the REPL process in the terminal. This will avoid a 'dead' repl connection. sesman-quit emacs command Or , m q q Spacemacs key binding The dead REPL is simply a CIDER connect that has lost its repl. So you can safely use a dead repl as the state is only what the terminal REPL state has.

Or you could automattically reuse any relevant repls in the Emacs config or a .dir-locals.el for a specific project

(setq cider-reuse-dead-repls 'auto)

FYI.. as of more recent versions, the repl will ask you if you want to delete the "dead" repl if you chose to create one.

Yes, I know and that’s what I would like to do automatically

ah apologies 😉 I just recently updated and saw this change. This new change worked for me. I had this little helper function that would just remove all cider repl buffers before connecting to clean up any unused once before I reconnected.