James, For working with Clojure, if you are happy with Netbeans, use it. Especially if you are relatively new to Clojure, switching to Emacs won't do groundbreaking changes to your productivity in the short term. As you become more and more savvy with Lisp, Emacs will have more and more to offer you.
However, your assumption that Emacs is "archaic" is wrong. Emacs is very mature and battle tested. Emacs is fully programmable, with very efficient shortcuts, a lot more features than you can imagine (especially for functional programming languages) and it simply has a lot less noise in the UI. It has most of the features people attribute to "modern Java IDEs" out of the box (Etags alone provide 80% of those features Eclipse users love to cite), newcomers just don't know about them because they have weird names for historical reasons or work slightly differently (again etags is a good example). But again, If you are happy with Netbeans or IntelliJ IDEA, don't worry about Emacs too much and ignore Emacs zealots. I can imagine that as time goes by and polyglot programming on the JVM becomes more and more widespread, IDEs like IDEA will offer cross-language intergration features Emacs won't match, at least without sophisticated extensions. 2011/6/18 James Keats <james.w.ke...@gmail.com> > Hello all. > > I'm currently using Netbeans' clojure IDE and I quite like it. It has > a REPL. It highlights syntax and matches parentheses. It supports > maven and mercurial/git. It provides completion and doc for both > clojure and java. It has allows evaluation of forms from source code > to repl. It also allows me to customize keyboard shortcuts. > > The other option that I've seen being popular is emacs with cake. I've > seen that cake opens two jvms, one for itself and one for project, ok, > nevermind that, no big deal, but emacs, i find, is unnecessarily > arcane compared to a modern java IDE. It's keyboard shortcuts and > combinations are based on ancient keyboards and terminals and > historical conventions, and while i can customize that and only use > what I need, netbeans already has a comfortable, modern setup out of > the box. I see that some would suggest paredit, but honestly, i don't > see that, navigating code through keyboard shortcuts, as all that much > of an advantage considering that using the mouse or the trackpad is > very convenient. > > What am I missing out on? Thanks. > -- MK -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
