I was an VI user earlier. But after I switched to dvorak keyboard layout navigating with "hjkl" did not seem that enticing any more.

For LISP hacking, the slime extension of emacs is really hard to beat - amazing productivity :)

Emacs + Slime + Swank = <3 and 0 interruption when deploying new code. Swank is an amazing tool to connect to a remote REPL. I wonder what the Vim lovers do without it.

And don't forget Paredit ... in fact just go ahead and read http://www.cliki.net/Editing%20Lisp%20Code%20with%20Emacs

I agree, I swank into both my local Repl and into my cloud Repl - it is pretty sweet.