When I started learning CL, I tried Emacs for a week, but then gave up. I was a VIM user already.

So this is my development environment and I have been using it ever since, professionally as well. I have one tab in terminal which has VIM, another tab that runs CL REPL (I mostly use LW Professional that allows building a non IDE image or SBCL).

I start my REPL as such: rlwrap -D 2 -m " \ " sbcl OR rlwrap -D 2 -m " \ " lw-console

Then I my REPL I can just press: [Ctrl + ^] and it opens a temporary VIM Buffer, so I can type away my Lisp expression and when I quit the buffer, the expression is available on the REPL prompt.

I have the usual suspects: tagbar and exuberant ctags, to help. I don't use auto complete much (a quirk probably).

But the fact that I can save my lisp image and come back later and start where I left is the big difference, which I can't do in Python or C++ (AFAIK).

So a simple setup with Vim, rlwrap (with ability to open temp vim buffer) in a Lisp REPL is possible and also productive. Still Vim is another beast, so the rider here is one knows Vim, but may be another text editor should also work.