@dev.4openid sounds messy. Do you really want to implement a significant part of your Emacs configuration outside of Spacemacs? Or do you already have an Emacs configuration that you want to keep? They seems to be the only reasons to take the approach you are discussing. I think you will largely be on your own as this would be a very custom setup. I would avoid cloning spacemacs into a sub-directory of .emacs.d , that is not what the Spacemacs instructions suggest and seems to be causing problems. Try following the instructions exactly and ensure it is working before changing to different directories. Typing emacs as a command by itself is not part of the instructions you have linked to. You do not state what file you are putting the spacemacs-start-directory configuration setting in, this should be in your own custom .emacs.d/init.el configuration file, not in any of the spacemacs configuration. You cant tell Emacs where to load Spacemacs from inside Spacemacs if you havent told Emacs where Spacemacs is already :) If you want to make add custom elisp configuation to Spacemacs, that can be done within the dotspacemacs/user-config section of .spacemacs. If you just want to version control your .spacemacs configuration, you can simply move the file to .spacemac.d/init.el instead and no specific configuration is required. This is what I did with my configuration - https://github.com/practicalli/spacemacs.d/

Does anyone have a good solution for integrating REBL with spacemacs? I understand this is more of a nrepl vs native repl (REBL expects a native repl right?) issue. But given i drive my nrepl often through cider via emacs i feel this is a good place to start.

@drewverlee REBL is on my TODO list (its a very long list) but havent even tried it yet. Sean Corfield seems to have used REBL quite a lot, but not with Spacemace or Emacs though. I found this project on the internet that connects to REBL over nREPL, so wondering if that helps https://cljdoc.org/d/nrepl-rebl/nrepl-rebl/0.1.1/doc/readme

Assuming you are using a deps.edn project, would it be as simple as adding the REBL alias defined in the project or user deps.edn file and then using a dir-locals.el to include the -A:rebl alias in the clojure command line that CIDER uses when running cider-jack-in .

Hmm, maybe not. The docs specify running REBL as the main namespace rather than your application code. I guess that makes sense as you dont want to connect the CIDER editor to REPL. Instead CIDER should be connecting to your project code.

Okay, so perhaps starting a Clojure project with cider-jack-in, adding in the deps.edn alias using a dir-local.el to set the :rebl alias as the default (adding it to the cider jack-in command). Then running REBL once the REPL for the Clojure project has started and connected to CIDER. It seems you can run an instance of REBL by evaluating (cognitect.rebl/ui) . Maybe there is a CIDER hook that can be called at the end of the cider-jack-in command that will call the REBL UI code? Something to try when I get a moment. Edit: this runs REBL but it's not connected to the Cider evaluation actions. It seems https://github.com/RickMoynihan/nrebl.middleware is the way to go. I'll try that tomorrow

@jr0cket I added the dependencies

[com.cognitect/rebl "0.9.108"] now 0.9.220

@dev.4openid https://github.com/cognitect-labs/REBL-distro seems to be the only source of REBL. No instructions are available for Leiningen, only deps.edn projects. For Leiningen you could try lein install with the REBL jar file, but it's been a while since I used Leiningen, so you may need to Google the exact command