This post is outdated and has been superceded by the much better work of Jake McCrary...  http://jakemccrary.com/blog/2010/12/07/quickily-starting-a-powerful-clojure-repl/

I love hacking on clojure/incanter using emacs, however this requires a tedious routine of starting up swank and then connecting in emacs via slime.  I am usually far too lazy to write shell or emacs scripts, but since nobody ever posted a method for doing this I decided that I finally had to figure it out myself.  Its rather elementary which is why I guess nobody ever mentioned it, but....

Here's what I did:

First off, I wrote the following executable shell script:

file: /bin/bash-clj

#!/bin/bash

bash --init-file ~/incant.sh

This starts a bash terminal loading the init-file incant.sh, which is simply another shell script that changes to my incanter directory and runs the script to start a swank server:

file: ~/incant.sh

cd ~/bin/incanter

./script/swank

Finally, I put the following lines in my .emacs file to trigger the loading of the above scripts and connect through slime:

file: ~/.emacs

(ansi-term "/bin/bash-clj")

;wait while swank is loading up...you may need to tweak

(sit-for 6)

; connect to slime on local-host, port 4005

(slime-connect "127.0.0.1" 4005)

;don't ask me annoying questions about version mismatch

(setq slime-protocol-version 'ignore) 

And there you have it!  

Straight to incanter's clojure REPL.