the tooling is the reason i gave up when i was interested in learning clojure. everywhere pretty much said that emacs was the "correct" editor to use for clojure, i tried it out for a bit but ultimately learning a new language and a new editor at the same time was just too big of an ask.
i tried calva with vscode afterwards but it was basically the same thing, calva has paredit which overrides the keyboard navigation and there was no way to disable it. somebody had asked for the option to disable it on the github but the creator said something along the lines of calva without paredit wasn't the way he wanted it to be used, so i just picked another language to learn.
Wow. I'm the creator of Calva and I can tell you that I do not have an opinion on how to use it. I would never say something like that, and now I wonder what I could have said that was interpreted this way...
By default Calva Paredit overrides three or so keyboard shortcuts. This is to help the users to not accidentally delete brackets, which in turn keeps the support questions down about broken Clojure code. I have tried to make it super easy to disable these overrides. There's a command for it. There's a button in the toolbar for it, and there's a setting for it.
There's also a setting for removing all Paredit bindings, even those that are not overriding any default ones. (This setting is for people who use Paredit, but want to provide their own shortcuts entirely.)
i tried calva with vscode afterwards but it was basically the same thing, calva has paredit which overrides the keyboard navigation and there was no way to disable it. somebody had asked for the option to disable it on the github but the creator said something along the lines of calva without paredit wasn't the way he wanted it to be used, so i just picked another language to learn.