The problem with almost all LISP tutorials, books,... is there's no guide on how to install toolings at the beginning. Instead, there's just praise and praise.
Literally everything you're asking for is in that link. The author has the opinion that you don't need fancy IDE features which is an arguable point but they do list what editors for each OS work in their experience.
I first leaned lisp in college (1964) and have not touched it much since then. But now that I am retired I am going to give it a shot. What extensions in vscode should I use? I installed steel bank and quicklisp. Thanks,
"Clojure for brave and true" has in my opinion an excellent section on Clojure tooling in emacs (which I wish i read when I was starting out with emacs).
It is a strength (they do cover tooling), but also a weakness. Throwing beginners into learning emacs, as well as a new language, and likely a new programming paradigm, is a massive ask. I think it is mistake for Clojure that Brave and True is the most recommended book to start out.
i use evil, because muscle memory. I havn't spent the time to train myself to learn something different. I probably never will because I still use vi/vim on remote machines.
doom emacs was a game changer for me and allowed me to pretty quickly switch from neovim. Since investing more in the ecosystem, I wont be letting go of emacs anytime soon
Let me clarify. I want an editor to behave the same as every other editor on my system. That means standard shortcuts for basic operations, for starters, the use of standard OS dialogs etc. Last I tried Emacs, you had to spend considerable time browsing the docs to figure out all the little things that need to be set in the config to get 90% there.
That is fair. Emacs does have a CUA mode[1] for more standard shortcuts. But the OS dialogs will not look native, and it makes sense if that experience does not work for you.
I see that in your professional capacity, you're an engineer on VS Code, so I bet that you know it well enough to make it work for you for Common Lisp, too. For all the oft-cited reasons, I cannot use VS Code. But it is great if it works for you.
FWIW I don't consider VSCode to be a particularly good example of native integration, either, although at least it tries. But, well - Electron.
As for CL itself, I dabbled in it in my time, and I found it more interesting to broaden the mind than useful for practical applications. The dearth of quality, well-maintained libraries is the main stumbling block for serious use. It's not that it's impossible - it's just that the effort involved in putting everything together exceeds whatever benefits accrue from the language itself being more powerful than usual.
That aside, though, the discussion was about how getting started with CL for someone new is more complicated than it needs to be in part because the ecosystem is so centered around Emacs for code editing. In general, people who get interested in CL are already devs - but Emacs isn't all that popular even among devs these days; I see Sublime far more often, for example. But all CL tutorials actively push Emacs - and for good reason, since it really is the best option available! - which makes the barrier of entry that much higher for people coming from, say, JS or Python.
Curious to know how big the cross section of people is that are ready/eager for CL, but don't want to touch Emacs. I think its rather nice this might act as a screen, they are both tied together, even if mostly spiritually now.
In general though, I'd say switch your focus to Scheme, and use Dr.Racket, if you really really don't want to use Emacs.
Such a missed opportunity.