It took me a bit to get my Aquamacs install up and ready to do Clojure and SLIME, so I figured I’d jot some notes down for future me and anyone who happens to be listening.

I assume Aquamacs has been downloaded and leiningen is installed. First, in a terminal, you’ll need to install swank-clojure. As of today, the current version is 1.4.0, but I strongly recommend you check the README to see if there’s a new version out. In the shell, lein plugin install swank-clojure "1.4.0".

I use Marmalade for package management, so the first thing to do is to add Marmalade to Aquamacs. Open up "~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs\ Emacs/Preferences.el" in your editor of choice (I used MacVim), and add the folowing:

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;; Marmalade
(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/"))
(package-initialize)

I’m assuming you don’t have package.el installed yet, so make sure to

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`curl "http://repo.or.cz/w/emacs.git/blob_plain/1a0a666f941c99882093d7bd08ced15033bc3f0c:/lisp/emacs-lisp/package.el" > ~/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs\ Emacs/package.el`

Now fire up Aquamacs (or evaluate the additions to Preferences.el with C-x C-e. clojure-mode needs to be installed, either via M-x package-list-packages, and marking clojure-mode for installation (with i) and installing (with x), or with M-x package-refresh-contents followed by M-x package-install clojure-mode. I also like paredit but you might not, it takes some getting used to.

Now, open up a file in your lein’d project and use M-x clojure-jack-in. You might see some errors pop up in your *Compile-Log* buffer, but you should be very shortly greeted with a REPL.

Happy hacking!

The End Result

Here’s a screenshot of how it turned out (click to view it full-size):

I usually run aquamacs full-screen with two panes, left-side for editing source code and right-size for SLIME.

References

I patched together my knowledge from a couple of pages:

• Incanter’s article Setting up Clojure, Incanter, Emacs, Slime, Swank, and Paredit
• The Doctor What’s article Aquamacs 2.3a and Marmalade
• Phil Hagelberg’s swank-clojure README