Debugging without slime is quite difficult however: as everything is available through slime, nobody cares about simplifying access to SBCL debugging features from outside slime. For example, having to prefix every variable access with SB-DEBUG:VAR when in the debug REPL is a real pain, and serves no purpose other than annoying non-slime users.
Yes, I do all of my text editing in Vim. I <3 Vim.