I used Emacs Live for quite some time. Then tried https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude because I couldn't get Emacs Live work with the most recent CIDER (clojure environment). I have been using that ever since.
{:user {:plugins [[cider/cider-nrepl "0.12.0"] [refactor-nrepl "2.2.0"]]}}
I highly recommend prelude to anyone who's not coming from vim (for them, I recommend spacemacs).
I settled on prelude because it is the most like a "vanilla" emacs installation (unlike spacemacs), and is easily extensible.