I kind of figured I was approaching this wrong. If that approach was useful, I would have found someone already implemented it. One silly hangup I have is I am more comfortable in Vim than Emacs, and I am trying to isolate my learning to a language and not a language-plus-an-editor. This must be how people feel when I suggest they switch to Vim to make a certain workflow easier :-)

My goal isn't really to get "IPythonButForCommonLisp", but to iteratively build up programs so I can quickly learn syntax. I'm going to go with the Slimv suggestion the next chance I get and see if that solves it. Instead of working in revisioned code, I'll probably just work in `Untitled.lisp` until I get the hang of things.