I don't see a single comment here on HN resembling religious debate. I see a lot of people wanting to help, but unable to unless you're specific about your problems with emacs. Emacs is the dominant IDE. All the alternatives have weaknesses. Which weaknesses are showstoppers for you, and which aren't?

But for common lisp emacs+slime is the way to go. This is similar to writing .NET in anything but visual studio, or java without eclipse or intelliJ. Of course you can do these things, but it's very likely you'll find some frustration. Of course sometimes using your favorite tool is worth the frustation, sometimes it's not.

Ever since writing an application in Smalltalk (squeak) I've realize that a language and the environment it's edited in are very closely tied together. If 90% of the community of lispers uses Emacs+Slime there's probably a good reason. I don't particularly like Eclipse, but if I'm doing a reasonably large Java project I'll definitely be using it.