It's not common lisp, but most of my Emacs use has been as a shell scripting alternative.<p>Workflow being based around interactive improvement of a script from a simple interactive-macro through to things that are effectively done as shell scripts.<p>The end result is something that can be run as a shell script, although translating to another language i.e. CL, Ruby, Go, etc. is the usual path for me to make better use / performance.<p>The old joke about Emacs being an operating system that needs a good editor is on need of a reboot.<p>Emacs is an interactive computing and development environment with half a dozen good text editors.<p>Factual isn't as funny though.