I've just started using Clojure (another Lisp) and I use IntelliJ IDEa with the Cursive plug-in, with par-infer to deal with the parens. It works like a charm.

I've just started using Clojure (another Lisp) and I use IntelliJ IDEa with the Cursive plug-in, with par-infer to deal with the parens. It works like a charm. I can have a REPL and my code right in front of me, I can cmd-down to go to a function definition, and it's overall a very pleasant developer experience. Now, I did experiment with Emacs, so I do understand what you're talking about -- kill-ring-save and the related key bindings made zero sense to me, and I was having trouble doing things I'd do easily in IntelliJ.