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I agree it's hard to write lisp without a proper editor. Having seen the light I just can't go back now. The power, ease, and simplicity are not something I've experienced with non lisps.

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I don't know much about Lisp, but at ILC 2014 [1] there were about 40 participants. In a show of hands, absolutely all of them used Emacs to write their Lisp. I've never seen Emacs unanimity anywhere else.

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http://ilc2014.iro.umontreal.ca/

Incedentally I also use Emacs for editing lisp. (emacs lisp and Clojure.) Learning the hotkeys/concepts behind structural editing of lisp code was life changing metamorphasis, but quite difficult overall. There's been some fantastic work done by the Parinfer [1] team to bring the awesomeness of structural editing of lisp to the masses. The basic idea is that your parenthesis should infer where they belong by way of your indentation.

I installed Parinfer it on my project: CLJSFiddle[2], and it's not what I'm used to and doesn't have everything but for a novice it is highly usable - check it out!

[1] https://shaunlebron.github.io/parinfer/ [2] http://cljsfiddle.com

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