Ivar Refsdal gave me a great link to a video demonstrating many of the features of SLIME and Emacs. I learned quite a few things from it. I highly recommend it.

I said previously that I wanted something to dim parens in Emacs when I look at lisp code. Enter parenface, which does the job.

Seems like I spend almost as much time setting up Emacs as I do writing code. But the good thing is once I set it up once it'll be set up forever.