It was this. I had not upgraded in some time.
@jr0cket thanks for the suggestions.
@mafcocinco sorry, I didn't read the whole description last night, you did say you re-installed Sapcemacs. Did you do a diff between your .spacemacs file and the template. If it's been 2 years since an update there will be changes. Or you could just move/remame .spacemacs and restarting Emacs will create a new one for you.
If you are using the default Spacemacs master branch, version 0.200, then there may be bugs that are only fixed in develop
. If you would like to try develop
(which most people run) then here is a switching guide https://practicalli.github.io/spacemacs/install-spacemacs/switch-to-develop.html
Be aware that there are a few keybing updates, so check the Readme first before upgrading https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/blob/develop/layers/%2Blang/clojure/README.org
Before changing anything with the Spacemacs / Emacs setup, I always check I can run projects via a command line repl. If it does work their, it's not going to work in CIDER.