Emacs + Cider

Web Development with Clojure, Third Edition — by Dmitri Sotnikov, Scot Brown (91 / 107)

👈 IntelliJ IDEA + Cursive | TOC | Vim 👉

Emacs is one of the oldest IDEs still actively used today. Being a mature project, it has lots of features and plugins available, many of which don’t have counterparts in other IDEs. However, it also means that Emacs doesn’t follow any of the common patterns, since it predates them.

Emacs is available for all the major platforms and can be downloaded from the official site.[89] Additionally, Emacs comes in many different flavors, most notably Spacemacs,[90] Doom Emacs,[91] and Prelude.[92] For installation instructions, please see the respective documentation websites.

If you aren’t already familiar with Emacs, be warned that it’s significantly harder to learn than modern editors. We recommend only using Emacs if you are either a current Emacs user or are a Vim user unsatisfied with the Vim ecosystem’s support of Clojure. If you do choose to use Emacs, be aware that a lot of power in configuration comes at the cost of some serious complexity.

If you’re coming from Vim, you should start with either Spacemacs or Doom Emacs. They both have great support for Vim emulation, or what is affectionately called evil-mode in the Emacs community. Additionally, they provide a decent amount of configuration out of the box, so it’s far easier to get up and running.