Yup this is yet another blog post that talks about setting up Clojure with Emacs, why another one ? well I think the Clojure world is changing so quickly that this setup process becomes easier every day, you may find this useful.

Why Emacs ? There are many, many posts that you can find that talk about why use Emacs for Clojure and I don’t think I can add any more to what has already been said.

I used the book ‘Sams Teach yourself Emacs in 24 hours‘ partly cause it was in our office library and no you will not be anywhere close to learning everything about Emacs in 24 hours but it is a very good book.

So lets begin

1. Install Emacs, everyone seems to prefer Emacs over Xemacs so I went with that, for Mac I choose Carbon Emacs.

2. Create a .emacs.d directory in your home folder and place a file called init.el , this is where all the customizations go.

3. Install ELPA it is an Emacs package manager.

4. M-x package-list-packages and install slime, swank-clojure

5. Make sure everything is working by trying out this.

6. For integration with a leiningen project see this page.

And finally here is my cheat sheet for Emacs.