Clojure and Doom Emacs on a brand new M1 computer

I've recently landed my first Clojure position and received an m1-powered MacBook. Two months before that, I had also bought myself an m1 MacBook air and had to set up Clojure to use it in my projects. Since I had no experience using macOS whatsoever I had to do some googling and managed to get a pretty simple setup running.

There are lots of tutorials out there on how to set up m1 laptops for Clojure usage, but there are a few quirks that aren't yet documented, such as how to get clj-kondo and parinfer to work in it. I'll try to cover these steps in this post, while also showing how to set up doom emacs and some other stuff I ended up using myself.

Let's get to it:

Lets now configure it so we can use tools such as CIDER and clojure-lsp. This can be done by changing the .doom.d/init.el file. We'll start by uncommenting lsp, and clojure (under :lang). We will also want to add +lsp to that clojure expression, making it (clojure +lsp). Having done that, we'll run ~/.emacs.d/bin/doom sync and our pretty basic Clojure environment will be set up.

Clj-kondo

Adding +lsp to clojure in init.el made doom add clojure-lsp to our emacs configuration. Clojure-LSP comes with clj-kondo, but, for some reason I do not know, flycheck won't recognize it, so we'll probably also want to install kondo as a separate executable. To do so, we'll need to install GraalVM.

Setting up GraalVM on an m1 device currently requires using a snapshot, so we'll simply use it. Follow this comment to get it up and running. (The file you should download is graalvm-ce-java17-darwin-aarch64-dev.tar.gz). After setting up, also add the GRAALVM_HOME variable to PATH -it should match the value for the JAVA_HOME for Graal.

We can now compile and install clj-kondo on an m1 device:

git clone https://github.com/clj-kondo/clj-kondo.git
cd clj-kondo
script/compile

Now simply add it to your PATH and you'll be able to use clj-kondo in flycheck.

Parinfer-rust

There is currently no releases of parinfer-rust for m1 devices. This means we need to compile it ourselves. We'll need to install rust:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env

We'll then move into compiling parinfer-rust:

git clone https://github.com/eraserhd/parinfer-rust.git
cd parinfer-rust
cargo build --release --features emacs

After compiling it, we'll move it to emacs:

mkdir ~/.emacs.d/.local/etc/parinfer-rust
mv target/release/libparinfer_rust.dylib ~/.emacs.d/.local/etc/parinfer-rust/parinfer-rust-darwin.so

We'll activate parinfer on our doom config by uncommenting parinfer in ~/.doom.d/init.el and adding (use-package! parinfer-rust-mode) to our ~/.doom.d/packages.el file and run ~/.emacs.d/bin/doom sync

And that's pretty much it for a basic setup :) Hope someone finds this useful

Clojure and Doom Emacs on a brand new M1 computer