Well, mv .emacs .emacs.backup and for the first time I’m following the emacs tutorial 🙂

Tutorial finished, going well so far. I can’t believe I was using evil mode all these years and didn’t know some of those things. It feels slower to have to prefix everything with C-<something> all the time, but IME writing Clojure so far, I don’t need all that vim-fu that efficiently allows you to slice and dice text.

Take a look at this if you decide to roll your own configuration: https://huytd.github.io/emacs-from-scratch.html

I found this the most straight forward "I want to build my own kind of Spacemacs" guide. That being said, I ultimately decided to leave out Evil and just learn the Emacs bindings first so I could utilize all the great Emacs guides out there. In a surprise upset, I've found I actually really enjoy the Emacs keybindings way of things. I think it might be a better fit for me than modal editing. I had already remapped Caps Lock to Control when using Vim and would highly recommend doing so whichever route you take.

With this, to get started with Clojure just use use-package to add Clojure mode and Cider. You can google around for minimal ways to do that. Start small and slowly configure as your learn your work patterns.