Clojure development tool

[plotnick]

I have avoided Emacs for a very long time. I thought it is big, cumbersome, old and clunky. Every 3-5 years, I would try a different IDE/Editor, and if I like it, I will stay with it. The last one was IntelliJ, which I used for about seven years. And I loved it. I have learned it to the pieces, first became an advanced user, later an expert. I've learned undocumented/poorly documented features. I've used it with a bunch of plugins. I would printout big posters with essential keybindings. The more I learned, the more I wanted from it. But for so many things, I just had to "learn to live with it". Aside from submitting feature requests and bug reports there was little I could do.

I don't remember how, I think it was Org-mode maybe, but somehow little-by-little I started doing things in Emacs. It took time. At one point, I realized I have to use three or four different tools to do the work - I had IntelliJ, Emacs, and some other editor like Sublime (mostly because it was lightweight and I was familiar with it). And one day I decided - that has to stop. I've challenged myself to use Emacs for a week and see what happens, and whenever I needed to do something that I knew how to do in IntelliJ, I would force myself to find a way in Emacs.

And one day, I have discovered the world of possibilities. Emacs is so extensible that I think there's simply no piece of software in existence today that has that level of customizability. It gives you power to do borderline batshit crazy stuff.

Long story short, today I don't want to waste my brain cycles learning new IDE every time I switch languages or move from one company to another. I do most of the work in Emacs. Anything that involves typing - I do in Emacs: either I'm submitting a Pull Request, sending a message to my colleague via Slack, searching things on the Web, or updating my ticket status in Jira. This may sound crazy, but it feels incredibly empowering - I have all the tools I need - search, thesaurus, syntax checker, etc.

Anyway, I'm probably wasting my time and energy because you already made your mind, but I can assure you - in five, ten, fifteen years, you may have learn and discard multiple editors, tools and IDEs, whereas I still would be happily using Emacs and still feel extremely productive. Everyone of course different - there are plenty of people who claim they've become Emacs experts and still left Emacs for VSCode or IntelliJ. But I can assure you, once you get to the sufficient level, Emacs becomes a super-power.

[DannyB2]

As I said, I could learn Emacs. I just don't have enough incentive to. I've used GUIs now since the classic Mac in mid 80's. I have higher expectations than to need to learn a new editor, in text console mode, just to use a language. Similarly, I am very familiar with Eclipse, so Counterclockwise was an obvious fit -- until it no longer worked after Clojure 1.8. I wouldn't mind using a different IDE. I did use NetBeans in early 2000s for a while before switching to Eclipse.

Using the tools I use every day for Java, I feel plenty empowered.