I'm a vim head too and tried to embrace emacs, because it seems the de facto standard, but I eventually realized it was dumb to trade my editor of choice for th

I'm a vim head too and tried to embrace emacs, because it seems the de facto standard, but I eventually realized it was dumb to trade my editor of choice for that reason, especially at the same time I'm learning a new language. So I ventured into Fireplace and the paredit equivalent (It's been a while so I forget the name) and I was much more comfortable with that setup. Also, I'm equally as comfortable in "standard" editors, like VS Code, since I have to use Visual Studio for work most of the time (vim plugins are ok, I just don't mind context switching, feels like it keeps the mind sharp). I've tried Calva for Clojure dev in VS Code and I think it's just as nice as the other setups. I don't think anyone using an "alternative" setup is going to miss out on any of the "big ideas" that make Clojure dev so nice. I suggest sticking with vim, at least to start. I've never had the opportunity to use Clojure in production projects but, as an exercise in learning the langue, I did a library that I've had to rewrite for many production systems (can't copy paste across companies), in various languages, over the past 15 years, and I liked the end result of the Clojure version way more than any other. It was objectively shorter and easier to reason about. Even the insane, invalid XML parsing that has to be done to integrate with a third-party interface. Just hope I get to use it, in a pragmatic sense, someday.