[maxgiraldo]

I can't speak about lein or maven, but it is in no way a requirement to use emacs as your editor. In fact, there is really interesting work going on in other editors like Atom with proto-repl[1]. For the web, you can spin up a Gorilla REPL[2] which basically gives you a Jupyter notebook but for Clojure.

[1] https://atom.io/packages/proto-repl [2] http://gorilla-repl.org/

[billfruit]

I thought the emacs tooling depended upon leiningen.

[didibus]

No it doesn't. It depends on nRepl.

Personally, I find maven repos and lein to be one of the better dependency/build ecosystem of any language. So I disagree with your premise. But, if you don't like them, there's a lot of alternatives.

For dependency management, there's now an official one, maintained and bundled with Clojure, called `tools.deps`. It supports multiple providers, currently maven repos, git repos and local folders.

For build tasks, appart from Lein, you can use Boot or Gradle. But there's a new trend now to rely on individual Clojure programs as the foundation for build tasks, which are then packaged and distributed through `tools.deps`. You can see their full list here: https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/Tools

In the ClojureScript world, there are less build options, but `shadow-cljs` has emerged as a replacement for Lein, and gained a lot of popularity, because it integrates transparently with npm.

[KingMob]

No. It depends on a library called nREPL, but you can start that in multiple ways (the other candidates being tools.deps and Boot)