Another possible 'canonical' solution is Technomancy (of leiningen fame)'s http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-s

Another possible 'canonical' solution is Technomancy (of leiningen fame)'s http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit http://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit. Removed a lot of the futz of installing emacs for me. I still haven't worried about slime or swank yet, and i had to use elpa's installer to install a simple clojure-mode (M-x packages-install [enter] clojure-mode [enter] i think) but its got a basic solid seeming emacs with paredit and clojure stuff going for me. caveat: github was being weird and i couldnt clone the repo so i had to visit the downloads page and get it to package up a snapshot for me. anyways, its the least painful experience setting up emacs ive had. ymmv?