Are there any good editors for Lisp programming, other than Emacs? [closed]

Question

I'm looking for an alternative, since I find emacs difficult to use. I'd rather use an editor that supports all the usual shortcuts I'm used to, such as arrow keys to move the cursor around, CTRL+SHIFT+RightArrow to select the next word, etc.

Basically, I don't want to have to relearn all my familiar shortcuts just so I can use emacs.

Can anyone recommend a suitable editor?

Another thing - Notepad++ supports LISP syntax coloring, but it doesn't have an integrated LISP console like emacs does. Would it be fine to just have a Notepad++ window and a Command Line window open, side-by-side, and use the command-line whenever I want to run my program?

Answer 1

Firstly, the arrow keys should work just fine on Emacs. (Emacs die-hards will tell you Ctrl-f/b/p/n are preferable, but you don't have to listen to them.) If they don't work by default, something is wrong.

Recent versions of Emacs come with cua-mode, which will make all the other common shortcuts like Ctrl-x/c/v for cut-copy-paste, shift-arrows to select, and so on work as well. If they don't work by default, type "M-x (that's Alt-x on most keyboards) cua-mode".

In general, if you want a particular keystroke to invoke a certain function, then type M-x global-set-key [hit Return] [hit the keystroke] [type name of function], e.g. M-x global-set-key RET [hit the down arrow] next-line RET.

Emacs was made for Lisp by Lisp programmers, and it is the best editor for Lisp simply on account of having been the standard Lisp editor for decades and having every idea for improvement been implemented.

Answer 2

Use DrScheme. It has got all of the standard keybindings that you might expect. Here are my notes on using it. Yes, it is built for Scheme, but maybe it would work well for you.