[gnosis]

I use vim for developing in Lisp, using Nekthuth to connect to SBCL's REPL:

http://nekthuth.com

Nekthuth doesn't have anywhere near the number of features or intimate integration with Lisp that SLIME has, but it's good enough for me.

I had tried Emacs with vimpulse and viper mode. Although it did make using Emacs less painful, it still required way too much knowledge of Emacs to use effectively and configure than I had time to dedicate to learning it.

Emacs+SLIME+vimpulse+viper might be good enough for someone who already knows Emacs or who hasn't invested a lot of time in learning vim. But for someone fluent in vim, I just don't think huge time investment in learning Emacs well is worth it.