I'm not going to lie, setting up emacs for lisp is far easier than any tutorial that i've wasted hours trying to figure out. So much time wasted, spending time trying to edit .emacs files outside of emacs; I found my own, much easier way of configuring this.

Already knowing that emacs comes with its own eshell for managing files and stuff inside of emacs (as well as a shell for managing files on your device,) and since I am a mac user, I simply installed homebrew on emacs eshell; and from there, it was cake to brew install clisp and sbcl repl's from eshell.

Next, we back out of emacs, and download the slime package from the web page, which took just a quick google search to find.

Now, again, we break out that emacs and use M-x, package install slime, then restart (doom, for me) emacs.

Now, using M-x, enter slime and you are ready to go with three powerful repls, for maximum coding performance for emacs lisp.

Whoever said emacs is too confusing to be worth learning is a liar; best learning curve i've overcome - the payoff is awesome.