Just install an editor plugin (parinfer I like now) to fix that easily. It's a pleasure. It's not hard to make your own really; it's, like you say, only cosmetic. You can format your code for reading in the same way with a trivial plugin; it is a really nice thing that you can very rapidly make something nicer tailored for you while still benefitting from the performance / debugging / etc in sbcl. For my dayjob, I work a lot with Typescript parsing and rewriting and, while the ts (and ts-morph and so on) are pretty nice, it's really a quite horrible experience vs what we have in lisp/scheme.