I'm a huge Emacs fan, but I'd recommend against learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time. While the tight REPL integration can be difficult to set up in vim,

I'm a huge Emacs fan, but I'd recommend against learning Emacs and Clojure at the same time. While the tight REPL integration can be difficult to set up in vim, you can use a separate REPL/editor environment to get going, and then ease yourself into a more integrated environment once you get a little more familiar with things.