The sibling comments seem to interpret your need in a lispy way! In IPython, you could use arrow keys to go back in history and then edit the code you want and execute it. It seems you're saying that CL doesn't have this feature. But what the commenters say is you don't probably need this feature anyway because you can write the code you want in the editor and send it to REPL. Python's REPL has this feature too, but obviously it's not a "clean" approach because sometimes we just want to experiment with things and don't want to pollute the main code with these one-off expressions.