[cbreezyyall]

I know other editors have their spinoffs but SLIME is the reason emacs is the go-to for lisp programming. it's really hard to beat that dev experience

[lispm]

EMACS was always used for Lisp programming, since day zero. It had always a mode for Lisp programming. Later GNU Emacs became popular and it was partly written in Lisp. Thus it was not unusual for Lisp users to provide Emacs modes for hacking other Lisp dialects than Emacs Lisp, because they could easily program it. Before SLIME, there was an integrated extension, then ILISP and ELI (from Franz). Nowadays SLIME and SLY are mosly used as IDE extensions for GNU Emacs..