SBCL is an excellent lisp implementation. The only
thing that's not so nice about it is overly simple command-line
interface. The absence of <UP>, C-a, M-b, etc. can be annoying,
even though I only occasionally use SBCL directly.
I have 3 solutions to this problem now:
Use SLIME, which is what I do most of the time, but sometimes this isn't practical.
Use Linedit. I tried this, and it was cool. But somehow I broke it and now I can't get it to work.
Use rlwrap. This requires you to either always invoke SBCL as
rlwrap sbclor create an alias for it. This works very well too, is very simple and doesn't noticeably increase start-up time.