I’ve taught programming for several years, and have been active in PL forums even longer. I’ve helped people learn C/C++, Perl, and Tcl (and some more to lesser extent), and I have *never* found any reason to demand that the learners should use some specified environment to enable me to help them.

Still, I *can* imagine one reason: that the interface/environment is simply too intrusive to allow a programming discussion that is decoupled from it. If that is the case, I submit that using Emacs to learn Lisp is highly sub-optimal for anyone, on #lisp or anywhere else.

Note two important words in the title: “#lisp” and “learn”. It is quite possible to be a fabulous lisp programmer and not use Emacs. It is possible to learn lisp without using Emacs. It is highly sub-optimal for most on #lisp to try to learn lisp without using Emacs.

Find another community.

Lisp is one of my favorite languages, but I keep getting fed up with it. One reason is this pervasive “Emacs is the One True editor” nonsense. Does using Emacs make you all so miserable that you need to compensate by belittling people who prefer not to use it?

No, I won’t be running *to* you. I prefer to run *away* from people like you.

That said … I abandoned work on slim-vim and purchased Lispworks Professional. So *I* moved to Russia.

But it’s still a stupid comparison.

I’ve found the combination of an sbcl msi package (like this, no doubt outdated by now, so look here), a Windows-adapted emacs (like this one), some asdf magic (such as this) and a vanilla slime works great. (Except for “C-c C-c” at the repl killing the underlying sbcl - but I guess just shouldn’t write non-terminating loops…)

Indeed, Dandelion could well be worth a look (but I don’t really know how it compares to Cusp). And, indeed, the commercial CL’s have their own more-or-less clickibunti IDEs. I get the impression, however, that their editors are emacsen, even if they have a thin layer of Windows-like keybindings as an option.