How to reconnect to slime/swank-clojure session?

Question

It seems that whenever I disconnect from clojure slime session, I cannot reconnect again. I am using leiningen to start the swank session (with lein-swank plugin). So, every time I quit emacs (I know I shouldn't) or reboot/logout I have to restart both slime and swank. Is there a way to re-connect to a slime/clojure-swank session?

Answer 1

Yes, but you have to tell swank not to close the connection:

lein swank 4005 "localhost" :dont-close true

Note that you have to supply the port and host name if you want to pass the :dont-close true portion; 4005 and "localhost" are the default values.

In fact, this makes it possible to connect multiple REPLs to the same swank instance at the same time! Then you can type in (def foo :foo) in one Emacs and see foo evaluate to :foo in the other. :-)