I tried using viper and vimpulse modes in emacs to get vim-style keybindings. The problem was that SLIME docs and most emacs tutorials assumed standard emacs keybindings.
In principle, you could convert all those docs and tutorials to use more vim-like keybindings, but that would be a lot of effort, and you'd have to learn emacs/SLIME with standard keybindings first.
Furthermore, if you rely on non-standard keybindings, you'd be completely lost when reading a conversation between typical emacs users, when they say stuff like "oh, just use C-X-a-b C-Y-c-d" or whatever (as they do in another post in this very thread).
For better or for worse, it seems the default keybindings in emacs are pretty tightly bound to its culture and ecosystem.
In principle, you could convert all those docs and tutorials to use more vim-like keybindings, but that would be a lot of effort, and you'd have to learn emacs/SLIME with standard keybindings first.
Furthermore, if you rely on non-standard keybindings, you'd be completely lost when reading a conversation between typical emacs users, when they say stuff like "oh, just use C-X-a-b C-Y-c-d" or whatever (as they do in another post in this very thread).
For better or for worse, it seems the default keybindings in emacs are pretty tightly bound to its culture and ecosystem.