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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> If Emacs is your thing, which it should be if you do Clojure,

This is the kind of attitude that keeps people away from your language. The amount of people who shun away from C# simply because they don't like the idea of Windows / Visual Studio should be a hint.

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> This is the kind of attitude ...

And it's unfounded. Thanks to Lisps unusually regular syntax adding support for semantic editing features (paredit-like) should be rather straightforward in any editor. And accidentally paredit is also enough to make coding any Lisp way more pleasant than editing raw code in other languages.

See http://emacsrocks.com/e14.html for an overview.

I'm actually kind of disappointed that in the demo I saw adding parens manualy, one at a time, instead of using wrap-sexp etc.

That's more of a Lisp problem than a Clojure problem. All the Expert Lisp Programmers settled on Emacs many moons ago (as in decades past) and no one has bothered to write another (good) Lisp-friendly text editor since. And well, you can't really write Lisp without a suitable text editor, so all the Lisp neophytes either give up or learn to cope with emacs and eventually forget about replacing it.

All the clojure tutorials I've seen recently have been using LightTable. Which is just as well since Emacs is not my thing.

all the Lisp neophytes either give up or learn to cope with emacs and eventually forget about replacing it.

This is really not true any more. LightTable is great for beginners, and there are more options for Clojure now. I'm developing Cursive, which is becoming pretty popular - Vim also seems to work well, Counterclockwise is good too.

Could you explain what you mean by a reasonable text editor? Thanks

I suspect he means one that has paredit.

Even before that, it's shocking how few text editors have basic Lisp indentation and REPL support.

I guess I did forget about Light Table (as AFAIK it doesn't support Scheme or Common Lisp yet), which seems like the right thing to point beginning Clojure programmers to.

Hell, that's probably a big part of why Clojure became more popular than the previous Lisps.

To be fair, I'm on-side with the idea of an environment that adds niceties for your language. However, I agree that you should be able to still have a decent experience without installing or setting up language-specific editors or environments. I've really enjoyed being able to get into Rust with nothing more than Vim and a terminal.

This was only meant as a recommendation, not a command. Lightable, Vim, Eclipse IntelliJ and quite a few others are perfectly viable alternatives. I have just personally found that Emacs to be excellent for Clojure development.

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