[hga]

"Everyone" was wrong when it comes to SICP. The standard environment for that is the MIT Scheme distribution (http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/) which includes a version of EMACS named Edwin which runs in the same process as your Scheme. It's trivial to install (at least on Windows, haven't tried Linux) the whole package and get up and running for the purposes of SICP, which have almost nothing to do with LISP/Scheme (at least in the first few chapters).

SLIME is supposed to be the way to go for a complicated LISP like Common Lisp or perhaps a richer Scheme or Clojure, but SICP is trying to teach you programming, CS and the like, and what you learn from about Scheme is incidental (well, until you get the the metacircular interpreter magic).