Comment by lispm

> While what you actually want to do, is connect your editor to the REPL, put the REPL in the background then evaluate code with a keyboard shortcut from your editor, and see the results in your editor.

In Lisp I would use both. In some Lisp IDEs (MCL, LispWorks, SLIME), evaluating from the editor actually can queue up the form into a Listener (aka REPL) tool. MCL did this by default, LispWorks and SLIME have commands for that.