[falcolas]

Ignoring the condescending remark for now, it probably was possible to run lisp without Emacs, but none of the tutorials mentioned how. They all pointed towards Emacs.

If I recall correctly, one tutorial (and several IRC lispers) even stated the following: "How do I use this with vim? Just use Emacs + SLIME, you'll be better off for it."

It's probably changed (at least I certainly hope it has), but it certainly hampered my adoption of lisp.

[klibertp]

It didn't change last time I checked - Emacs is still almost mandatory for almost all tutorials on Lisps (I searched for beginner tutorial for Clojure about half a year ago). I find this attitude stupid too. Emacs is a great editor, not to mention operating system, but I just don't like it and I feel that I have the right to do so. It shouldn't be too costly to list the alternatives and help with getting expected functionality in other environments.

This was never really an issue for me though, because I was lucky enough to start my adventure with Lisps from Racket and it's excelent IDE, DrRacket. I then used it with other Lisps, because I was already familiar with it and adding some keywords (well, names - for indentation purposes) was trivial. I didn't use them (other Lisps) long enough to be seriously irritated by the lack of built-in repl, so obviously YMMV - but I would recommend DrRacket as low-entry-barrier alternative to Emacs for Lisps editor - it handles parentheses rather well :)

[falcolas]

Good information, thank you.