Do you use the repl to simply (load ...) files; never doing anything interactively with it? When I'm using emacs+slime I constantly write small loops/functions in the repl for testing, but doing that with rlwrap feels pretty painful to me. Do you have some sort of scratch-file that you write those in, which you can easily load?

At least to me the debugger feels pretty horrible to use without slime. How do you usually fix/redifine functions when debugging a problem? How about stepping through code? Making sense of the compiler notes/errors must also be pretty annoying without having them highlighted in your editor?