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by packetlost 929 days ago
What do you use for an editor/IDE? I'd love to write more Clojure, but the tooling story is a bit confusing
2 comments

In my case, Emacs+clojure-mode+cider. I'm not sure I recommend learning Emacs at the same time as Clojure though. I usually recommend new users look to Cursive(for IntelliJ) or Calva (vscode) depending on what they are most comfortable with.
I'm a vim user and there's no way in hell I'm switching to emacs, even with EVIL mode. I'll check out Calva
I forget what the current recommendation for vim is, but back when I still wrote a lot of Clojure, people used vim-fireplace. I think there is a newer one for NeoVim, though
Almost ten years ago, I gave a lightning talk about Overtone (Clojure mappings for SuperCollider). I used "vim-fireplace" to connect to cider-nrepl and had a pretty good experience being able to quickly eval sexps in Vim.

I'm sure this is wildly outdated by now - I'd be shocked if there wasn't something halfway decent in the NeoVim ecosystem.

I will say, though, that during a brief flirtation with Spacemacs, I absolutely loved the Clojure integration - emacs just feels like it's more "at home" with lisps. Some of the most satisfying programming experiences I've had, honestly.

As a Vim user I agree. Spacemacs is an excellent Clojure dev environment.
The spacemacs / emacs feature I miss constantly in Vim / VsCode is "slurp/barf" - which is amazing useful in plenty of contexts that aren't s-exps.
I too resisted emacs for years while writing Common Lisp in vim, but eventually I ported my vim config line by line to the emacs lisp implementation of the vi standard
Checkout Cursive on Intellij. The $100 on Cursive is the best $100 I ever spent on a tool.
Author of Cursive is on Hn also.
Check out Conjure for nvim: https://github.com/Olical/conjure/
I'm currently a Conjure (and vim-sexp) user, but was wondering if there was something Clojure specific that didn't also have annoying tabbing defaults
Hopefully someone will chime in with their recommended setup for vim. I think there is pretty mature tooling available, but I'm not immediately familiar with it, so my advice there would be no better than Google.

Calva is a solid choice if you don't mind switching editors.

Emacs + CIDER and paredit. Works great!