Emacs

So I have over many years occasionally got into emacs, sometimes because it is the best/recommend ide for a programming language and once because of org-mode. Usually I drift away because I get annoyed with it not providing the features I want.

We when I say not providing I really mean it provides them but I can't get them working. Over time I have learnt to avoid it and have got quite reasonable at vim.

Recently I returned to emacs because I have decided to spend some time with clojure and see if I take to it. It also happens that version 24 of emacs has been released.

I must say either my brain has moved closer to the way emacs works or emacs has improved quite a bit since I last used it. There seems to be proper code completion for practically any language you want, org-mode is still great and the built in theming is nice to have.

Yes setting up the .emacs file can be a combination of fun and pain but the package management system seems to work well once you add marmalade that it. It being installed by default is great.

My clojure set up is the usual clojure-mode, nrepl, auto-complete with ac-nrepl. Probably quite standard by all accounts.

Now I could have used CounterClockwise, the eclipse plug in for clojure, and been hacking on clojure a little sooner. The reason I decided to not do this is because of fun. I wanted learning clojure to be fun and using a totally different dev system that is different from Visual studio (C++ at work) and Eclipse (Java for android stuff) will mean it is less likely to feel like work. Different is fun :)

Clojure wise I plan to develop a few simple programs say a calculator and maybe a text adventure. Then go from there.