Make sure you are comfortable with Emacs. It is possible to write Common Lisp without it, but Emacs and SLIME are so much better than anything else it feels like cheating.
>..make sure you are comfortable with Emacs.
As an emacs user myself, I must say -- that's a high bar for trying to digest a new language.
Learning Lisp really is more learning a complete development environment; a development philosophy even. Sure you can write Lisp as you would C, editing in a basic editor and then compiling and running the complete program in a a shell, but it’s really missing the point. While that reduces the learning curve significantly, it reduces the benefits even more.
and more: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...