Clojure Editors
The last "State of the Union" Clojure survey (survey question 20) indicated that Emacs is still the most popular editing environment, followed by IntelliJ/Cursive, VS Code, and Vim.
If you are already using one of these editors, follow one of the guides for that editor to integrate a REPL-based Clojure workflow, so that you can focus on learning just the language.
If you are not using one of these four editors, try to pick the one that is closest to what you are currently using, unless your editor is listed on the Clojure Tools page with an active Clojure integration.
If you are coming to Clojure as a beginner, and don't have a history with any of these editors, you might consider starting with VS Code and Calva, which has a very low barrier to entry.
Despite the popularity of Emacs within the Clojure world, you don't want to be learning both Clojure and Emacs at the same time!
Emacs
Emacs is the longest serving and most customizable editor available and for years it was the overwhelmingly popular choice for editing Clojure code.
Popular variants of Emacs include Doom Emacs and Spacemacs.
CIDER is the most comprehensive package for editing Clojure with Emacs. Other options are clojure-mode on its own and inf-clojure for integration with a basic Clojure REPL.
For a complete, opinionated, and well-maintained configuration for Emacs, you might consider Prelude by the creator of CIDER.
You can also get static analysis and refactoring support via
clojure-lsp for Emacs (and
it should also work out-of-the-box with eglot,
which is built into Emacs 29 and above).
See the Editors guide on clojure.org for more links ("most customizable").
IntelliJ/Cursive
Cursive provides a full-featured IDE for Clojure. This is a great choice if you are already familiar with IntelliJ and/or you plan to work with both Clojure and Java (or other JVM-based languages).
See the Editors guide on clojure.org for more links ("Java tilt").
VS Code
Calva is a comprehensive package for editing Clojure with VS Code. It uses Clojure LSP and clj-kondo to add static language analysis features in addition to the dynamic features available via nREPL and cider-nrepl.
See the Editors guide on clojure.org for more links ("beginner friendly").
Vim/Neovim
The main options here are:
- vim-fireplace (for Vim)
- vim-iced (for Vim/Neovim)
- Conjure (for Neovim): Getting Started, Conjure/Neovim on Practical.li
See the Editors guide on clojure.org for more links ("highly efficient").
Additional Tools
The following data visualization tools can be very helpful when editing Clojure and evaluating code: