I really want to get into Clojure, but everything I've read suggests that I'll have to learn Emacs to do it. Does anyone think giving up Vim for a few months is worth it?
I still use exclusively Vim for all my clojure coding. I have Vim in one window (with VimClojure for syntax highlighting and some other features), a REPL in another (for quick experimenting), and my ant script in another for compiling and testing the whole thing. It's not as integrated as SLIME and emacs, but I don't feel like my tools are slowing me down significantly.
With Emacs(w/paredit)+SLIME you would be doing "interactive development" which is really a fundamentally different and better way of using Lisp. I cannot recommend it enough.
I've been using clojure for a while now (nothing huge LOC-wise, but it's a pretty significant part a large system). I use vim, and haven't had any troubles. The clojure REPL doesn't seem to have readline support, but it works fine with the rlwrap program. I've been meaning to learn emacs to try out the niftier select and execute functionality that it has, but vim does work for me.
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.
