> Those of you who prefer some kind of GUI, look into Xemacs. It can be set up to respond to your mouse-clicks. I don't want to nitpick here, but the tedious d

> Those of you who prefer some kind of GUI, look into Xemacs. It can be set up to respond to your mouse-clicks. I don't want to nitpick here, but the tedious distinction between the "graphically challenged" GNU Emacs and the "some kind of GUI" godness of XEmacs is getting rather old. Precisely, it is around 20 years old, since the debate started somwhen at the beginning of the 90s. Much, much time has passed and much, much has changed since then in GNU/X emacs land. But otherwise, youre completely right. Emacs feels today what running a Lisp Machine must have been back in the day, and it's wonderful. Your complete environment is written in Lisp, you code, chat, mail, all at the same time in/with Lisp, and you can modify all of it at run-time, all the way down (Well, mostly). It is a pity that Emacs is stuck with Elisp for the foreseeable future, so although a "Lisp", it cant fully profit from all the available Common Lisp goodies, but for a beginner, it is all more than enough to start. And even if one day he or she might want to move on to Common Lisp, SLIME would be there waiting patiently.