Are you using the CL REPL directly on a terminal emulator? I do not type expressions directly into the REPL often. I do sometimes but not often. Instead I send expressions right from the editor to the REPL. The REPL itself is available as a separate buffer in the editor. How this is done depends on the editor/IDE. Some examples:

• With Emacs + SLIME, we can type C-M-x (evaluate current top-level form) or C-x C-e (evaluate the expression before the cursor).

• With Vim + Slimv, it is ,e and ,d respectively.

• Yet another popular option is Vim + Vlime in which case the key sequences are \ss and \st instead.

I have written two guides to explain how to create such a development environment from scratch and get started with such a setup:

• https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl

• https://susam.net/lisp-in-vim.html

There are commercial implementation + IDEs too which according to many people provide even better integrated development experience. The most popular among them is perhaps LispWorks. I use Emacs + SLIME myself.