How does one not use leiningen? Do you just substitute lein for the other build tool provided by cognitect? All the tutorials I've seen have you jack-in to a lein REPL. I guess I could just use the jar file from the download directly as my REPL? I wish more tutorials started that way so I could learn without all the tools that I don't need at this point.

Thanks for helping point this out. Cursive has a trial license and is pretty cheap, but it is still annoying to get a license to something you might not need in my organization if others aren't already using it (probably easier to get visual studio for over $1k than $100 cursive license). VS Code asked me for the leiningen REPL path and I just gave up at that point for the night. I wish the Clojure download zip came with a very simple IDE like Dr. Racket or the GroovyConsole with line wrap, parenthesis matching/highlighting and a pane for the file and REPL and some pre- loaded tutorials. I would have no excuses.