I had similar issues trying to get used to EMACS when I was playing the CL. Add to that the fact that I tend to use Windows at least half of the time, and I wanted an alternative.

I ended up setting up Atom with SLIMA and some other plugins to do CL development on Windows and Ubuntu. I even wrote up some very sparse instructions https://github.com/Kehvarl/roguelike-tutorial-cl/blob/main/d...

While Atom is gone, Pulsar now has a SLIMA plugin to allow Lisp interaction.