Question: I've been a UNIX sysadmin for a long time, and aside from automating tasks with shell scripting, some light PHP work, and a few simple C programs, I've never done much in the way of programming. I recently decided to stretch my mind a bit and learn Common Lisp.

I'm half-way through Touretzky's "Gentle Intro" and, having just reached the chapter on I/O, I'm wanting to get beyond typing stuff into the REPL as I walk through the book and the exercises. The problem is that I can't find a decent howto/tutorial on getting a decent, working environment.

I've installed emacs (which in itself is a tough change, as I've used vi for almost 20 years), SLIME, and several CL implementations. However, the documentation for any one of these pieces is enormous, nevermind trying to wade through all three. I have skimmed several free online CL books and all of them are agnostic to the environment, assuming that you'll be typing stuff into the REPL or loading source files.

It would really make this experience much more enjoyable if I could find a decent intro to setting up an Emacs environment for Common Lisp that allows me to edit in Lisp mode in one window (function and variable auto-completion would be really nice here), see the results of evaluating single expressions (both output and return value) in another, as well as be able to tell the whole buffer to be evaluated and "run" while I see the results somewhere.

Any and all pointers would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: My platform is FreeBSD/amd64, and I prefer open source solutions.

Answer: 
Don't give up Vi/Vim just because a large percentage of people like Slime.

I've written about this before here on SO. Check these out:

* [Using Vim for Lisp development](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/94792/using-vim-for-lisp-development/556236#556236)
* <https://stackoverflow.com/questions/451329/what-is-the-preferred-way-to-run-lisp-web-application/558329#558329>
* [Best Common Lisp IDE](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/232486/best-common-lisp-ide/552607#552607)
* [Are there any good editors for Lisp programming, other than Emacs?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/282905/are-there-any-good-editors-for-lisp-programming-other-than-emacs/594349#594349)

I'll be happy to answer specific questions here.
I can say that Emacs is a good environment for writing Lisp, since I used it in college to that end. The `*scratch*` buffer provides a good place for test code. The compiler docs should say how to call them, so you can write out your files to disk and then run them in a shell window, or use one of Emacs' modes to integrate the edit-compile-and-run. (Sorry I'm not more specific, it's been 15 years.)