Susam has a very nice Githup repository that contains an Emacs configuration for working with Common Lisp. The nice thing is that the README contains a complete explanation of what the configuration is doing and has a line-by-line exegesis of it so that you can understand how it works and how to modify it to suite your individual needs.
I don’t use this configuration—having started with Common Lisp long before I saw it—but my configuration is almost identical to Susam’s. The main difference is that I don’t use rainbow delimiters. I’ve found that Paredit keeps track of parenthesis nesting for me but you may find rainbow delimiters useful.
Susam thinks of his configuration as being for Emacs/Common Lisp n00bs and therefore has some introductory material on using Emacs itself but even if you’re experienced with Emacs but not with Common Lisp, you will find it useful for getting started.
The main features of the distribution are:
- Slime
- Paredit
- Rainbow Delimiters
- Quicklisp
Some of these require a bit of configuring to invoke them for the appropriate modes so Susam’s configuration is a good place to start. You can, as I did, figure all this out for yourself but Susan’s configuration provides an easy starting point.
The README for the repository is fairly long but worth at least skimming through if you’re interested in setting up a Common Lisp development environment.