When I first started using CIDER I was intimidated by the block of 41 cider-mode and 25 cider-repl-mode interactive commands (to be fair, there's a lot of overlap between the two). Luckily you only need a small subset of these commands at your fingertips to be very productive:

REPLs and Namespaces

Open a project file (created with Leiningen or Boot) and in that buffer C-c M-j to launch an nREPL server and corresponding REPL client. This client will be associated with your project. You can see the nREPL server in the mode line – in my case: cider[clj:demo@:51099]

You're done with your REPL and you want to quit: C-c C-q. This is one of those commands I wish I'd seen earlier. I spent so much time killing nREPL buffers manually.

From your clojure buffer you can use C-c C-n to switch to this namespace in the REPL. C-c C-z actually switches to the associated REPL buffer (and back!).

Evaluating Functions

Load your current buffer with C-c C-k. You can do form evaluation a few different ways, here are the basics:

  • C-c C-e: eval the form to the left of the cursor (the pipe below) and show the result inline. 

    (map #(* % %) (take 5 (range))|) => (0 1 2 3 4)

  • C-c C-c: eval the top-level form at point and show the result inline. 

    (map #(* % %) (take 5 (range))|) => (0 1 4 9 16)
  • Bonus: Try C-c C-p and C-c C-f for pretty-printed popup buffer versions of the previous two evals, respectively. Useful for copying output.

Other Useful Tools

A few other basic but high impact functions include:

  • Jump you to the definition of the symbol at point with M-..
  • See clojure docs for the symbol at point via C-c C-d d and java docs with C-c C-d j.
  • In the REPL C-c C-o will remove the result of the previous evaluation, useful especially when you have a verbose output clogging up your workspace. With the prefix argument, C-u, it will remove all previous output.