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Comment by muraiki | Hacker News Reader

I just got back into using Clojure after a bit of a hiatus (and after having learned vim). I found a very comprehensive book online called "Clojure for the Brave and True," but then saw that chapters 2 and 3 are about using Emacs. I figured, "Don't worry about that, I'll just use Light Table." I installed it and noticed that not much had changed. Still, I maintained hope that LT would keep improving and be the awesome Clojure/Clojurescript editor I thought it would become. Needless to say, I'll be reading those Emacs chapters this weekend. :(

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Come on guys, Emacs isn't that hard. You can be productive with it after have gone through the tutorial that comes with it.

Like Unix you can't grok all of it (ever), but you won't ever need all of it. Just learn more of it as you go along. See it as a trip :-)

And if you need your Emacs Clojure development environment right now, have someone make a VM for you.

> Come on guys, Emacs isn't that hard. You can be productive with it after have gone through the tutorial that comes with it.

...and customized it enough to have an environment comparable to what other editors ship out of the box

    wc -l ~/.emacs.d/init.el 
    241 /home/dario/.emacs.d/init.el

241 lines of emacs lisp, and I'm still unsatisfied with the current state of my emacs

    ls -l ~/.emacs.d/emacs.org
    -rw-r--r-- 1 user user 67417 Oct  1 17:01 ~/.emacs.d/emacs.org

And after 15 years I'm getting finally somewhat satisfied. However, the alternatives were always worse.

I should have made note that the reason why I picked vim over emacs for general coding is that I found the various modifier key combinations required to seriously aggravate my RSI (I was unable to complete the tutorial); on the other hand, vim's modal editing has been a huge help. I'm aware of evil mode, so perhaps I'll have to go that route...

The ctrl+spacebar and search way that Light Table works, while not the fastest, was still preferable to holding down multiple modifier keys.

All that being said, the source of my hand pain might actually have to do with my neck and back, as working on those areas has substantially relieved my pain. So perhaps that will no longer be a barrier to emacs usage in a few months. :)

No, you're right. Emacs default keybindings and especially the longer 'chords' for frequently used commands are horrible.

I've never used the defaults[1] for long. First by making my own custom keybindings, then by making keybindings compatible to what most others applications use and a couple of years ago by switching to evil-mode. I already had vi/Vim experience so that was pretty optimal.

[1] Except some really basic ones that I also use in the shell: C-a, C-e, C-r, etc.

If you don't like to chord, you can always use M-x, the same way as invoking commands in light table and even better. See helm-M-x: http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html#sec-4

Please see my reply just above yours. You can use vim with clojure too!

Vim async infrastructure is 'less polished' then emacs. That is why even Vim fans (like me) consider learning emacs for Clojure development.

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