Hey, psssst, I made an updated version of this post here There are a few things you need to run on your , the first thing is called and it works like npm for nodejs or bundler for ruby, or the dotnet cli for c#, it’s a project runner and a dependency manager (sort of). clojure Mac leiningen Here’s how you install it: brew install leiningen That’s it! That was painless. Unless it wasn’t in which case you don’t have homebrew installed, and you should do this first: /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" There we go, run that first thing again, it was painless. Next step, start a new clojure project: now lein new my-project Hey, this thing is pretty simple pretty easy. Next step is to actually run the project. Open up your favorite text editor, scratch that, go ahead and install . I’ll wait. Now that it’s installed, install the plugin. Now you’re ready to edit some clojure with zero configuration! lein and intellij community edition cursive cd my-projectidea . Open up and add a new function src/my_project/core.clj (defn hello [name](str "hello " name)) Now click the project name in the tree view on the left and press ctrl + shift + R. A REPL should show up on the right. Move the cursor to the function you just made, type cmd + shift + P (or ctrl + shift + T, depending on your keymap). The function will be sent to the repl. Now below your function type (hello "world") And hit cmd + shift + P (or ctrl + shift + T) again. Sending “forms” to the REPL (the stuff in parens) from your editor is a great thing, you don’t have to type out things directly in the REPL, where I think a lot of people think that’s what a REPL is. You can build up a lot of state in the REPL without closing it for weeks and without directly typing in it at all. I also made another small screencast showing going from lein in the terminal to cursive and sending forms to the REPL. It’s pretty raw, and it’s only a minute, but hopefully it will convince you to give clojure a shot!