Make clojure functions available in every namespace during development?

Question

I have number of useful helper functions that I use at the REPL during Clojure development. This includes some built-in functions like doc and pprint, but also some custom ones of my own from my user.clj. The default clojure experience seems to be:

dev> (doc +)
;; works
dev> (in-ns 'project.core)
project.core> (doc +)
;; what is this "doc" thing you're talking about!?!?

which is pretty irritating (I'm aware that I can refer to clojure.repl/doc here). Is there an easy way to ensure that something is available during development regardless of which namespace I'm currently operating in?

Answer 1

One option is to add a :repl-options to your project map in project.clj:

(defproject myproj "1.0"
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.9.0-alpha15"]]
  :repl-options { :init-ns myproj.core
                  :init (require '[clojure.repl :refer :all]) })

...

$ lein repl
myproj.core=> (doc +)   ; works

Answer 2

As Alex Gherega mentions, it's probably a bad idea to automatically and indiscriminately import stuff into every namespace. However, you could create a macro (or maybe a function would work?) to help import development-related namespaced when/if they are needed. Add it to your user.clj. Then if you are working in another namespace and decide it would be useful, you can just run (user/import-useful-dev-stuff) (or whatever you decide to call it).

For what it's worth, I pretty much do all my REPL sessions within the user namespace and require all the namespaces I need from there. I use Emacs, and if I need to change something in another namespace, I just change the source, then do C-c C-k (after initiating a cider session) to reload the file. If you don't use Emacs, it's only a little more work to reload from the REPL via require with the :reload option.