For what it’s worth, if your goal is to write Lisp in Emacs, a reasonable environment can be set up in a few minutes on a modern system with a package manager:

1) Download Emacs 2) Download e.g. sbcl 3) Install SLIME using Emacs’s package manager 4) Maybe install paredit

That’s basically it, modulo a few small bits of configuration I may have overlooked.