You're probably using different things two years later, but just answering for channel context... There's no Cursive style plugin for Emacs. To get similar features, I'd recommend using Flycheck integrations with CIDER, which will give you syntax highighting / code completion / other goodies while you're connected to a running REPL. You might also consider clj-refactor , but notice that using some of this tooling can be challenging for an Emacs newbie (though isn't it all? 🙂)