About a month ago, I was praising Chlorine, the new Clojure package for Atom and I've been using it, day-in, day-out, for all my Clojure development. On a Mac, that's straightforward because I start a Socket REPL on the Mac and I run Atom on the Mac so when I connect via Chlorine and issue the Chlorine: Load File command (via Ctrl-, f in my keymap), it sends (load-file "/path/to/file.clj") to the REPL, for the file being edited, and that is evaluated and loads the source from disk and compiles it. On Windows... Well, on Windows there are a few obstacles to this workflow.

The first obstacle (for me) is that clj doesn't run on Windows and that's what I use for everything Clojure on a Mac and on Linux now. There's a PowerShell implementation in progress but Windows has always been a bit of a second-class citizen so it's still a ways off. But Windows has WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) so I can and do run (user-mode) Ubuntu on my Windows laptop and I do all of my Clojure work on that...

...but that brings the second obstacle: file paths on Windows look like C:\path\to\file.clj and under WSL they look like /mnt/c/path/to/file.clj. That means your editor on Windows and your REPL on Linux don't quite speak the same language.

Fortunately, the latest release of Chlorine, 0.0.8, has a "smart" Load File command that will work with both a Windows-based Socket REPL and a WSL-based Socket REPL! It wraps the call to load-file in logic that looks at the requested file path and also at the user.dir JVM property and if the former starts with a drive identifier and :, and the latter does not, it assumes the REPL is running on WSL on Windows and maps the file path appropriately.