I've given Allegro a spin, and LispWorks too. I liked Allegro's UI better, but both just give off the "We designed our UI in the 90s, updated to the WinXP plastic chrome at one point in the early 2000s, and haven't touched it since!" vibe. It's just not very pleasant, especially with a big screen... I use Eclipse at work for my Java day job (IntelliJ is also an option but Eclipse is fine for me) and it makes me sad that its UX with all its clunkiness and compromises to be a mega plugin-extendable open source IDE still feels better than the IDEs that just need to support Lisp. If either Lisp company would offer a subscription license model similar to IntelliJ's along with even vague promises of modernizing the UX (like it's not a good sign when your product landing page literally still has a Windows XP screenshot http://www.lispworks.com/products/lispworks.html ) I'd start paying immediately, but I suspect most of their revenue is from the core Lisp image, their side products (I've heard AllegroGraph is amazing if you need that sort of thing), and various customer support contracts for not just the products but bespoke extensions / feature requests. That is to say, very little from the editor itself. Yeah you can always use their Lisp with emacs/slime but then part of the point is lost. ;)
There are a bunch of oldish things in it, but the backend is relatively native - so the application has a newer look on new systems.
They also improve the CAPI GUI layer with releases with new features.
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw71/RNIG/html/readme...
http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw70/RNIG/html/readme...
There are a bunch of new IDE features, like visual profiler output, Code Coverage tool, support for remote debugging, ...
You'd have to read the release notes to find all that stuff. All in all it is a very feature-rich system...
It might not look as trendy as IntelliJ or VScode, but compared to stuff like Eclipse I'd say it does quite well.
Here's a screenshot on macOS https://i.imgur.com/ml4jlYB.png browsing some example code.
EDIT: A similar screenshot on Windows https://i.imgur.com/qkgIXhE.png
If you don't mind branching out Racket w/Dr Racket is zero setup and great fun w/great docs. If you go Clojure, many options that don't require setup (LightTable, maybe, e.g). If you want to stay common lisp, Lisp Works has a "personal" and "hobby" version of their IDE and that's free, zero setup, and a mature IDE.
I don't care about the downvote, but ftr, I a have been using emacs daily for about 25 years, spacemacs now, and love it. So there.
All I meant was that the OP I assumed knew about emacs and it's lisp history and was choosing Atom instead. The reason to do that would be learning curve, which I respect. Fair enough; I judge not. Just... you, know, for clarity.
The last emacs I used with any regularity was XEmacs.
I recently decided to screw around with Lisp again and have been using SBCL with Atom via the Slime plugin, but it’s not very good. I can’t evaluate functions from the editor, nor can I copy-paste multiline functions into the repl. It’s very frustrating.