Finer-grained opt-in to overlays

[daveliepmann]

I'm thankful for CIDER 1.8.0's improved use of Clojure 1.10+ error reporting features. One way I'd like to leverage this change is to get short/non-stacktrace error messages as an overlay, without changing the behavior of 1. stacktrace/*cider-error*-opening errors or 2. normal evaluation.

That is, my dream scenario is:

1. successful/uneventful form evaluation, e.g. (range 100) --> no overlay, see result in minibuffer
2. early-phase error (reading, macroexpansion, compilation), e.g. :::5 or (def 5) --> error overlay
3. late-phase error, e.g. (throw (ex-info "boom" {:a "a"})) --> open *cider-error* with stacktrace, no overlay

Because cider-use-overlays is coarse-grained, it seems 1 and 2 are currently incompatible. Would it be possible to get more fine-grained config here?

Cheers and thanks

(relevant clojurians thread)

[vemv]

Thanks!

It seems feasible. defcustom cider-use-overlays currently accepts 'both, t, or nil.

We could add a errors-only option, which would be like t. Errors show in the repl in all cases, so we don't need both-errors-only, t-errors-only, etc.

[daveliepmann]

Cool!

Errors show in the repl in all cases, so we don't need both-errors-only, t-errors-only, etc.

This doesn't matter to me because I don't mind if situation 2 (early-phase errors) shows a message in both minibuffer and the overlay (with the latter color-coded as an error), but I can't speak to the preferences of others. As long as 1, 2, and 3 are separately configurable I'm satisfied.

[vemv]

We have #3524 in transit, feel free to chime in