Lem is still too Emacs-like.

I'm talking about beginners, not seasoned Lisp hands, most of whom—until the great boomer dieoff occurs at least—are already comfortable in Emacs. If you're still just finding your feet in Lisp, you're not aware enough of its tremendous power to miss it from your IDE. You're just wondering why you have to Escape Meta Alt Control Shift to get anything done instead of, you know, just using the menu and mouse commands and keyboard shortcuts that literally everyone else uses.

You can always start the REPL on its own and start playing that way.

Or use something like:

  sbcl --load <filename>