LispForum

So I started learning lisp to a decent beginner level a year ago. Lack of simple documentation and a window-y editor was pretty annoying. I don't like the idea of having to learn an editor where I need to first learn a "hot-key language", another programming language just so the editor doesn't get in my way, and then C just so I could do "simple" things like sockets and GUI. (so used lispworks, but personal edition is no go and a paid edition of lisp isn't worth it for my 2nd or so hobby(maybe eventually I would have broke down))

So then I started learning newlisp just recently. so it has the best lisp documentation I've seen so far in a lisp(biggest issue), has a window-ish editor, and comes already equipped with things that are pretty much required like sockets, multiprocessing, and you can pretty effortlessly deploy it(to exec or whatever, use the java GUI thing, ect). But I've come to be annoyed by it since it makes some annoying choices in syntax, and some cases purposeful ones like not having unquote. It's also way worse than lisp when it comes to searching for help, which is pretty depressing.
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So I'm pretty much at a cross roads. I've come to really like lisp syntax, and the basic level I can get stuff done on. But I've come to really dislike what it takes to get lisp to work.

any type of advice would be helpful. pretty much looking for a way to use a language I've come to like, without the stuff I dislike.

Most CL implementations have sockets. No need to write C code there.

CCL has a good binding to the OS X GUI libraries. LTK makes it easy to use Tk on any platform. CommonQt and EQT and cl-gtk2 and others provide bindings to other major GUI toolkits.

If you want an all-in-one environment with an active community, there's also Racket.

Many thanks will give it a good try.