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Comment by _vya7 | Hacker News Reader

After spending 50 months with Clojure, I can safely say it's my favorite server-side programming language (with Datomic as my favorite database), and the tooling (CIDER + Paredit + Emacs) is really downright amazing in terms of productivity.

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Although the tooling is great, I found it super frustrating that you basically have to use the entire suite of prescribed tools to feel productive. Basically everything except emacs sucks with clojure, especially if you're a vim user. I found that pretty frustrating. Vim fireplace sucks. Then if you want to use a gui editor with a vim plugin you have to abandon the vim world and use editor-esque paredit plugins (since no one is developing vim-style paredit for vim-editor-plugins) gasps for air.

Then finally there's emacs which I really don't want to get started with.

I switched to IntelliJ + Cursive, and haven't looked back since.

Yes! 1000 times, yes!

Yeah it's a very real form of lock-in, nothing else really compares to Emacs + Paredit + Cider for productivity. And Emacs isn't great. But when I did Clojure full time for 5 years, I just sucked it up and learned Emacs and got really good at using it. Customizing my init file little bits at a time probably added up to a month's worth of lost productivity. But out of 50 months, 1 month lost to environment setup isn't bad. That's like 2% of the whole time. Or about 48 minutes per week. And the learning curve for me (as a long-time vim user) wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be, especially since knowing bash shortcuts really helped prepare me for the Emacs way. In fact I even took some Emacs knowledge back to the shell, such as how Ctrl-underscore is "undo the last edit to the current command".

I couldn't be happier with vim-fireplace, vim-sexp, and vim-sexp-mappings-for-regular-people. What about vim-fireplace is frustrating for you?

I use whatever editor at any given moment and then use (use 'my.testing.namespace :reload) in a repl in a terminal window. I have to watch for namespace collisions in the repl when refactoring into other namespaces and reloading those, but works really simply.

Highly recommend LightTable. its perfect for clojure.

Isn't it abandoned by it's author?

It's definitely not as integrated into Vim as in Emacs, but I use Vim exclusively with Clojure and have no real issues with it. For ClojureScript, Figwheel automatically hot reloads on file save, so there's no interaction with the editor at all. With Clojure, either lein-ring automatically reloads as needed, or I can eval the changed file in an open REPL with Fireplace.

I am using https://cursive-ide.com/ since early public versions and nothing from vim or emacs world compares to this for Clojure.

For what it's worth, I'm a pretty happy vim-fireplace user for evaluating files and forms. I also happily use standard vim brace matching, text-objects, etc instead of paredit or similar.

For JVM development, I only bother with NREPL because vim-fireplace needs it. For library development, `lein repl` gets the job done. For application development, I copy/paste around just enough code to launch an nrepl server and run the Clojure jar directly with a vendored directory of jar files. No other tools needed really.

I was a long-time vim use, and I found slimv to work pretty well with Common Lisp, but at the time I was never very interested in Clojure. Since then, I've switched to emacs using evil-mode to provide a vim editing experience: and, I have to say, evil-mode is almost better than vim itself. I've used evil-mode+cider to develop a couple clojure web apps and, I've been very happy with my setup.

http://paste.lisp.org/display/340427

(and, yes, I have tried spacemacs, but found it unpleasant)

Atom + ProtoREPL[1] + Parinfer[2] is surprisingly good for clojure, without having to learn a swath of form manipulation keybindings. I haven't tried combining those with vim bindings. This (https://gist.github.com/jasongilman/d1f70507bed021b48625) is more or less how I have it set up.

1: https://github.com/jasongilman/proto-repl

2: https://github.com/oakmac/atom-parinfer

I wrote a post detailing a couple of possible editor choices (but focusing on first-timers and people who only occasionally need to edit Clojure code while working on something else - I think Nightcode is a good choice in this case - so probably not directly applicable to you): https://klibert.pl/posts/tools_for_lisp_syntax.html

Still, the two screenshots there (of my Emacs config) may help convince you to give Emacs a try.

I have gone down the same road. I settle with Intellij, Cursive is quite good and as a Vim user, I have vimidea which is pretty ok. Background: I find Vim or Emacs really slow when you develop big projects, Intellij is much more responsive which is exactly what I needs to get things done.

Just to keep piling on, intellij + cursive is pretty incredible.

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