I can't say that I've run into this exact issue, or even exactly what the issues have been that I've run into with Emacs, but I know I've spent many hours reading instructions, following tutorials and generally just trying to get a basic emacs/lisp setup running. It's really difficult to do. I think I had a partially working Clojure setup, but then I tried to make it support Common Lisp in addition, and things completely broke down.

I'm not claiming to be a genius level programmer here, but I don't think I have to make that claim either. There's something seriously wrong with Emacs when an experienced programmer has serious issues setting up a basic development environment.

For comparison's sake, I hit "comfort-level" with Vim within two weeks, including a fully customized .vimrc, colour files and keyboard navigation. After a month of using Emacs I was somewhat comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts for basic navigation, but didn't know how to do several things that I could do in Vim. I also had no idea how to add syntax highlighting for language X - managing only to get it working for one dialect of Lisp and nothing else. Ah, and installing from ELPA had a nice tendency to show me error messages instead of actuall installing anything.

Bah, sorry for the rant. It just frustrates me when I hear about Emacs and how great it is, and I totally get on-board with it, but then it's just this fustercluck of configuration hell that never ends well.

> I think I had a partially working Clojure setup, but then I tried to make it support Common Lisp in addition, and things completely broke down.

This is due to the SLIME developers' insistence on making everyone run from CVS trunk. I wish I were joking, but they really seem to have no interest in creating stable release packages, so I have to go in and try to make it work without their cooperation.

Interesting. For what it's worth, I plan to give Emacs another go pretty soon here, but I'll be sticking with Common Lisp. I'm kind of done my courting period with Clojure.

Emacs + Slime for CL should be a piece of cake as long as you don't insist on using your distribution's packages. Mail me (see profile) when you run into any problems and I'll help you out.

Thanks! I'll give it a good, honest go and if I run into issues, I'll take you up on your word. :)

Emacs 23 does not come with ELPA installed. The next version of Emacs (24) is going to have a package manager included by default (it is based on ELPA) that will allow you to use Marmalade. If you are using Emacs 23 (which you probably are if you installed from your distro's package manager) then you should use ELPA. If you installed Emacs from a nightly build then you can use Marmalade.

Sorry, you're right. I was confused by the ELPA page which lists instructions only for emacs 21 and 22, but says elpa will be included in the next version of Emacs. (edit: now I can't find where I read this. I'm incredibly confused.)

Now I'm confused about how my other installs have it working.

I've suffered from the same confusion, on finding that ELPA no longer worked for me with Aquamacs 2.0, I tried using the Marmalade repo with no joy.

Quite frustrating as I was using ELPA in my fork of the Aquamacs Emacs Starter Kit: https://github.com/evangineer/aquamacs-emacs-starter-kit

FWIW, things go a lot more smoothly if you use GNU Emacs rather than a fork. For most elisp maintainers it's not even possible to test with Aquamacs.

"Ah, but now you're not following the instructions provided by swank clojure which says to use marmalade (which is an elpa extension/replacement/clone/additional repository?)"

They seem to have changed the instructions again. The folks developing swank-clojure seem to keep changing their install strategy. Boo on them. Near as I can tell, installing from ELPA, installing swank-clojure through Leiningen, running swank-clojure through Leiningen, and calling 'M-x slime-connect' should still work.

"But elpa is not included in emacs 23 on Gentoo."

Holy crap, I just checked this and you're right. (The Gentoo package maintainers seem to have a problem with letting other package managers compete with their precious portage however, so I'm not surprised.) In this case, I'd suggest that the Gentoo devs should be the ones to warn you.

"Obviously my problems could be from a lack of experience with Emacs, but I hate that using a text editor is so hard."

I don't know what to tell you. The problems you listed aren't your fault and they're Emacs' I'd blame the package maintainers in the Gentoo episode but the Clojure stuff is because the Clojure developers still can't decide how they want their stuff to work. I can't blame them much for that. Experience would help, but I doubt that I have that much more than you. I've had similar episodes installing plugins for Eclipse.

And Dave Abrahams is now actively developing el-get, which I prefer to ELPA. http://github.com/dimitri/el-get

Ditto. With el-get, I can link into the source git repository, and not wait for manual submissions to the ELPA repository, which always lag the actual release.

ELPA/package.el is broken as far as I'm concerned. el-get is a breath of fresh air by comparison.

package.el is included in Emacs 24, not 23.

Once that has had a stable release, this will become a lot easier. In the mean time, the link to package.el for Emacs 23 is right at the top of marmalade-repo.org: http://bit.ly/pkg-el23

Thanks for your clojure work. I'm using a lot of your stuff and I am grateful you take the time to write and release it.

"In the mean time, the link to package.el for Emacs 23 is right at the top of marmalade-repo.org: http://bit.ly/pkg-el23

You know that, but nothing on the page indicates it. In fact, that page leads me to believe it is the same version as tromey.com hosts. It isn't made clear that marmalade is a fork rather than an additional repository.

Plus that package.el does not integrate (or include instructions on how to integrate) with Emacs the same way the one from tromey.com does when you run the code on http://tromey.com/elpa/install.html