vim + slimv is a pretty good combo, if you're used to vim. Also, although it's not widely used, Atom seems to support slime:
Just grab the latest release from https://github.com/slime/slime/releases Install atom-slime and sbcl (something like brew install sbcl on osx) Point atom to the directory you extracted slime to and then hit packages > slime > start
These development environments just were IDEs written in Lisp, otherwise they most don't have to do much with those Lisp Machine IDEs.
Most Common Lisp IDEs had a collection of these tools: Editor, Listener, Inspector, Debugger, Stepper, Preferences, ... Additionally there were various browsers, an interface builder, profiler, ...
The Lisp Machine IDEs had most of these tools, too. But they weren't only styled for development, but also for general use. Thus a Lisp Listener was not only a REPL, but also a general command line interface to interact with the machine. They were also more oriented towards group work and had additional features like versioned file systems, software versioning systems, databases, support for multiple programming languages (like C, Pascal, Ada, Fortran, Prolog, ...), source repositories, ...
Over the years (80s onwards) a multitude of these IDEs on Workstations and PCs were developed. CMUCL comes with one for X11 (debugger, editor, ...), Macintosh Common Lisp, ExperLisp, Procyon Common Lisp had one for Macs and Windows, Golden Common Lisp had one for Windows, Corman Lisp for Windows, SPE from SUN, Lucid CL had one (called XLT, their editor was called Helix), Star Sapphire Common LISP had one, Clozure CL has one for macOS (which one can run on a current Mac), ...
Then there were always IDEs based on GNU Emacs or XEmacs. Ilisp was once popular, Allegro CL has ELI, SLIME currently is the most popular with Sly as a fork. This is not so bad, since there are decent versions of GNU Emacs for Windows, Unix/GTk+ and macOS.
Of the commercial ones only Allegro CL (IDE for Windows and Unix/GTk+) and LispWorks (IDE Windows, Unix/Gtk+, deprecated for Unix/Motif, macOS) survived with regular releases.
Of the non-commercial ones SLIME/GNU Emacs is the most popular and it is also used by some users of Allegro CL and LispWorks. McCLIM lingers in the background with a collection of tools which would make an IDE, but it lacks one or more better GUI backends.
There are also a bunch of other ways to use Common Lisp with other editors (vim, atom, ...).
Now 'darkmatter' is another one. Let's see what people think from using it...
I don't know how the actual UI currently looks like, but even if it still looks like Windows XP, the IDE and Common Lisp compiler are still quite ahead compared with what Emacs + SLIME are capable of, specially in GUI related Lisp development workflows.
Maybe they could improve their marketing message, but I doubt most wannabe Common Lisp developers are willing to pay for comercial tools, with enterprise prices, even if they had the best marketing of all times.
Lispworks has a free "Personal Edition". It's good enough to get through something like Practical Common Lisp and get a feeling for writing lisp, however since it uses an old version of ASDF, it's a bit difficult to use the "modern" quicklisp ecosystem.
Their pricing pages are also a disaster.
I had to drill down a few pages deep to find these epic tables:
http://www.lispworks.com/buy/prices-1c.html
which presumably could be distilled into 32-bit/64-bit categories plus a maintenance add-on.
The point being made is that they apparently haven't updated their screenshots in over 10 years, making their product seem dated- a pretty big marketing fail.
LispWorks has been developed from 1987 onwards since 30 years. They can't update their marketing material every year just because someone changed the GUI look. ;-)
Though I'll propose it to them for the next LispWorks release...
A major Windows release is kind of a big thing in the desktop world.
Missing 5 Windows releases is just sloppy: Vista, 7, 8/8.1, 10.
I'm not saying it's a bad product, just that first impressions matter. There's a reason this site is full of discussions about conversions and funnels.
As a side note, Windows is also 30+ years old. Hardly new tech these days ;)
> A major Windows release is kind of a big thing in the desktop world.
I can bet that LispWorks' customers (big companies and experienced lisp users) are largely away from the mainstream desktop world, and wouldn't care too much on how the current Windows UI looks like.
Software age is a non-sequitur- there are plenty of active multi-decade projects that can update their marketing material once in ten years.
Nobody suggested they do so every year, even though it takes what like an hour?
For a product costing $thousands there is not really an excuse.
I wouldn't recommend Slime to ANYONE because the developers do not care about security. The issue[0] of a gaping security hole has been open for going on two years.
That actually scares me enough to disable Swank on my laptop. Actually, to disable all localhost services that could by any stretch of the imagination execute code.
Tl;dr: web sites can send requests to localhost TCP sockets despite origin restrictions using a trick called DNS rebinding.
Sadly the only Lisp environments that resemble in any way the old Lisp Machine or Xerox PARC ones are comercial.
Emacs is kind of ok with SLIME, but it still isn't the same as using Allegro Common Lisp[0] or LispWorks [1].
[0] - https://franz.com/products/allegro-common-lisp/
[1] - http://www.lispworks.com/