When comparing Light Table vs Cursive IDE, the Slant community recommends Light Table for most people. In the question“What is the best IDE for Clojure?” Light Table is ranked 5th while Cursive IDE is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Light Table is:
With LT's inline evaluation, you don't have to re-compile your whole source file. Each time you want to see an output, all you have to do is hover your cursor over the line you'd like to evaluate and press `ctrl+enter`; LT will evaluate that line of code for you.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Inline evaluation
With LT's inline evaluation, you don't have to re-compile your whole source file. Each time you want to see an output, all you have to do is hover your cursor over the line you'd like to evaluate and press ctrl+enter
; LT will evaluate that line of code for you.
Pro Your code runs live as you write it
The "Watches" feature lets you see your code running live as you type it. This means that you can debug your code live while writing it, which leads to considerably less programming errors.
Pro Plugin manager available
LT has a plugin manager built directly inside of it. This plugin manager connects to LT's own registry of plugins, so whenever you want assistance while writing your HTML, JS, or even Python, just open up the plugin manager, search for it, and click the little install button beside it's name. Your plugin will then be installed.
Pro Built on IntelliJ
Includes automated code inspections and seamless Java integration.
Pro Paredit-style structural editing
Just like emacs.
Pro Written in Clojure (mostly)
They eat their own dog food, so to speak. And it integrates properly with the Clojure ecosystem tools, like Leiningen and nREPL.
Pro clojure.test support
Cons
Con Expensive (but only for commercial development work)
Why pay $99/year when Clojure-Kit is free?
Con It's based on IntelliJ
IntelliJ is a text editor. A code oriented text editor, but just that. It has the feel of something that was gee-wiz in the '80s. The worst of emacs without the functionality.
Con The "free" version is non-free.
The "free" license is only for non-commercial use. Cursive does have a "free"-as-in-beer license, but it's not free as in speech. There are open-source alternative without this restriction.