The background to this is that I’ve (a) recently been doing some Clojure and am slightly addicted to the REPL-connected editor, and (b) I’m a total Elixir beginner (1 week in), so all my coding is at this stage “exploratory” (playing with examples from what I’m reading, trying out Kernel functions, etc).

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• iex: fine for one-liners, but a bit clumsy for anything more, and I’d much rather use an editor (and preferably the same editor I would use for real code)
• iex -S mix, then calling on functions in files, reloading after edits: better, but still more friction than I’d like
• via unit tests, writing small tests for the exploratory code & running mix test. A variation here is to use fswatch to run tests on every file save, but I haven’t got this working yet.
• again via unit tests, but triggering tests from the editor (in my case using GitHub - adamzapasnik/vscode-elixir-test-explorer: VSCode Elixir test explorer · GitHub).

The final one above seems the most fluent approach so far, definitely workable, though ideally I’d like not to have to write tests for this kind of very transient exploratory code.

Any other ideas? I realise I’m not going to get a lisp-style repl experience (which is fine - Elixir has its own virtues), but something in that direction would be nice. A non-clojure example I quite like is Quokka for javascript/typescript.