Quote Saint Ignucius from the Church of Emacs: " Although vivivi is the editor of the beast we consider vi as a penance not a sin"
Totally, I don't think even that it's possible being productive with Common Lisp using vim. Just don't fit in my mind. I use vim to edit my /etc/fstab and works really wonderfully. But Common Lisp? D: maybe there is some magical stuff, unicorns plugins and so on...
I use emacs for Clojure but I've got two amazingly productive coworkers who use neovim. It is a non-issue for them.
Given that wookie's author uses vim it is clearly possible. Another prominent lisper that uses vim is Steve Losh, they've even written their own swank equivalent based on nrepl, cl-nrepl https://github.com/sjl/cl-nrepl
I'm using vi (not even vim) for Scheme and some obscure LISP dialects and I indent my code manually. The magic is in LISP itself, no plugins required! :)
Whenever I wrote Common Lisp, I used vim + tmux + rlwrap & sbcl. I didn't find it to be a hindrance, but I've never done really complex things with CL either. YMMV :)
I used slimv for a while and it worked pretty well. Now I use evil-mode.
Do you use CL with Vim? How you handle the repl integration, ASDF, quicklisp, indentation?
I use slimv for indentation/general prettification. ASDF, quicklisp, repl, those I all do separately (I use gnu screen, have a screen for building/repling).