January 1, 2026
Dream IDE or just a window?
Easel Turns One One year of building my own IDE in Clojure
DIY coding studio turns one—fans swoon, skeptics say the graphics feel clunky
TLDR: Easel, a DIY coding studio, turns one and demos modular tools that work together. The crowd splits between dream-IDE praise and complaints about clunky visuals, sparking a bigger debate: maybe the perfect editor is just a smarter window manager—either way, it’s pushing fresh ideas.
Easel just blew out its first candle, and the comments immediately turned into a fan club vs. reality check. The project is a home-built “coding studio” where little tools plug together and share data—like Lego for programmers. The demo video had people cheering, with one user shouting “absolutely amazing” and another calling it “very close to my dream IDE”, even dropping a mini how‑to so others could spin it up in minutes. Nostalgia flowed too: folks name‑dropped old school systems like NeXTSTEP and Smalltalk, dreaming of a workspace where apps talk to each other like it’s 1993.
Then came the spicy part: the UI debate. A skeptic hit the brakes, calling Java’s graphics libraries “clunky and dated,” and hoping a native path will smooth things out. Another tinkerer said they’d been eyeing browser-based editors but got pulled into the Easel orbit anyway. And the philosophical mic drop? One commenter asked if the “perfect editor” is basically just a smart window manager that couples components tightly. Cue the memes: “IDE as a library” became “the IKEA editor,” while Emacs veterans flexed that they’ve been living inside a Swiss Army knife for decades. Love it or side-eye it, the crowd agrees: Easel’s user-first, experimental vibe is waking people up.
Key Points
- •Easel is an IDE written in Clojure, structured as an “IDE as a library” with modular tools that can share data and run independently.
- •The vision includes runtime extensibility, strong REPL-driven development, rich data interaction, 2D/3D graphics, data orientation, and open-source, user-centric design.
- •Easel is built on the JVM to leverage its library ecosystem, garbage collection, multithreading, dynamic runtime capabilities, and mature tooling.
- •Clojure contributes immutable data, project stability, REPL support, and flexible data-oriented programming constructs.
- •The JVM’s dated UI libraries (Swing, JavaFX) are a trade-off; the project opts to build UI components, drawing on historical examples (NeXTSTEP, Smalltalk, Emacs) of integrated tool ecosystems.