I appreciate that I'm off the beaten path here, and folks look for a much higher fidelity dev experience than before. That said, outside of using a bit of Lisp

I appreciate that I'm off the beaten path here, and folks look for a much higher fidelity dev experience than before. That said, outside of using a bit of LispWorks 20+ years ago, my "dev environment" for Common Lisp is CLISP and Emacs, but not like you think. I use Emacs simply because of TAB to autoindent. (I'm sure vim has something similar, I just haven't bothered to look it up.) I don't use SLIME or anything like that. While I used to be an Emacs user, not so much any more. It's all arrow keys, pg up/pg down, some ^S to search, ^G to stop, mouse to select, Cmd-XVC cut/paste/copy, ^XS to save. And, that's about it. Forget window and buffer management, one and done! I reload in CLISP, and run everything from there. Relying on the GNU readline interface, the listeners , *, *, etc. Particularly today, it has to be the lowest bandwidth dev experience. I don't even use any of the S-expr manipulation commands in Emacs. Just doesn't get much more advanced than ^D, backspace, ^A, ^E, ^K and ^Y, and relying on paren matching and TAB indention to catch things. But it works. 99% of the time, I simply abort out of the stacktrace. Very rarely I'll crawl up the stack. I use the time proven "print" debugging "tool". And the listener. LOTS of rinse and repeat. I don't do huge projects, but they're "thousands" of lines of code. I don't use many libraries (I have quicklisp installed, I just don't use any of them). But I'm not interfacing with anything. It's mostly a bunch of crude simulations and such I dabble with. Even back with LispWorks I operated this way. My mind doesn't "see" S-exprs like that, it's just lines of characters. But, I don't think it slows me down. Learning SLIME, scaling the wall of the "sane development environment", yea, it's steep. It's why I haven't scaled it. Simply, I want to get stuff done, not fight the tools. So, I get stuff done with my stone knives and bear skins "IDE". The language has value, and power, and is very useful outside of its dev environment.