Setting up a Common Lisp Environment

Update August 2011: Things have changed again, which has always been the problem with Slime, and the reason I originally wrote this. Currently, I think the best way to install Slime is with Quicklisp using quicklisp-slime-helper.

Common Lisp is possibly the most advanced programming language. Think of pretty much any programming language feature and Common Lisp probably has it. Since lisp is the programmable programming language, when someone invents a new language feature it can probably be added to Common Lisp without even touching the language core.

However, if you're interested in digging into Common Lisp to try it out, you may find yourself quickly running into walls just getting started. It's a lot different than other programming environments you may be used to. The Common Lisp tutorials generally skip this step, assuming the user has an environment, or leaving that setup for the "vendor" to handle. So, here's a guide to setting up a great Common Lisp environment with Emacs and SLIME. It should work with any Common Lisp implementation and any operating system that can run Emacs (i.e. most of them). Even a much less capable one like Windows.

First, you need to pick a Common Lisp implementation and install it. Ideally, it should end up in your PATH. Like C, the language is defined solely by its standardized specification, rather than some canonical implementation. Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is currently the highest performing implementation, it's Free Software, and it runs on a wide variety of platforms, so take a look at that one if you're not sure.

Next, install Emacs. We're using Emacs not just because it's the best text editor ever created. :-D It's because that's what SLIME is written for, and Emacs is a lisp-aware editor. Really, Emacs is a lisp interpreter that happens to be geared towards text-editing. It's accused of breaking the rules of unix by being a single, monolithic program, but it's really a whole bunch of small lisp programs. You can even have a lisp REPL in Emacs (ielm), similar to what we will have once we're done here. It's plays very well with Common Lisp.

If you're unfamiliar with Emacs, you should stop here and familiarize yourself with it a bit. Really, you could spend a decade learning Emacs and still have more to learn. The tutorial should be good enough for now. Fire up Emacs and run the tutorial by pressing control+h then t. In Emacs notation, that's C-h t. C-h is the help/documentation prefix, which can be used to look up variables/symbols (v), functions (f), key bindings (k), info manuals (i), the current mode (m), and apropos (searching) (a). In the info manuals, you should be able to find the full Emacs manual, Elisp reference, and Elisp tutorial, since they are generally installed alongside Emacs these days. Nearly anything you might need to know can be found inside the included documentation.

Next, install SLIME. I'll be a bit more specific for this one. Make a .emacs.d directory in your home directory (whatever your HOME environmental variable is set to). This is a common place to put user-installed Emacs extensions. You will be putting your slime directory in here. There are two basic ways to obtain SLIME, as indicated right on their main page. You can do a CVS checkout of the SLIME repository, which allows you to follow it and run the latest version. Or you can grab a snapshot of the repository, which is provided, and dump it in there. Since I like you so much, I'll give you a third option. Here's a Git repository, maintained by someone very kind, that follows SLIME's CVS repository,

git clone git://git.boinkor.net/slime.git

Ultimately, you should have a directory ~/.emacs.d/slime/ that contains a bunch of SLIME source files directly inside.

Now, we tell Emacs where SLIME is and how to use it. Make a .emacs file in your home directory, if you haven't already, and put this in it,

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/slime/")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup '(slime-repl))

Once it's saved, either restart Emacs, or simply evaluate those lines by putting the cursor after each them in turn and typing C-x C-e. If you did everything right so far, you shouldn't have any errors. (If you did, go back up and see what you did wrong.) If your Common Lisp installation didn't end up in your PATH as "lisp" (not uncommon) for some reason, you may need to tell Emacs where it is. For example, I can point directly to my SBCL installation with this line,

(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl")

If everything is set up right, fire up SLIME with "M-x slime". It should compile the back-end, called swank, and run a Common Lisp REPL as an inferior process to Emacs. You should end up with a nice prompt like this,

CL-USER>

At this line, you can start evaluating lisp expressions as you please. But this isn't where the true power of SLIME comes in yet. I'll give you an example: make a new file with a .lisp extension and open it. Throw some lisp in there,

(defun adder (x)
  (lambda (y) (+ x y)))

Type C-x C-k and it will send the current buffer over to be compiled and loaded. This code here uses a closure, so you know you aren't accidentally using Emacs lisp, as it doesn't have closures. At the REPL you can call it,

CL-USER> (funcall (adder 5) 6)

Which will print the return value, 11. That's all there is to it. You write code in the buffer, then with a simple keystroke send it to the Common Lisp system to be evaluated and loaded. Because the SLIME key bindings eclipse the Emacs lisp key bindings, you can type this same line in the lisp source buffer place the cursor at the end, and type C-x C-e, which will send it out to Common Lisp to be evaluated. Look at the mode help (C-h m) to see all the key bindings made available.

This is a great programming environment that makes Common Lisp all the more fun to use. You run a single, continuous instance if your program growing it gradually. (This is exactly how I built my Emacs web server with elisp.) You can test your code as soon as soon as it's written.

The setup can get even more advanced. The Common Lisp REPL need not be running on the same computer. It can be running on another computer, as long as SLIME is able to connect to it over the network. Several developers could even share a single Common Lisp process running on a common machine. Lots of possibilities.

If you don't have a Common Lisp book yet, there's Practical Common Lisp, which you can read at no cost online or download for reading offline. It's based on an Emacs and SLIME setup, so you'll be right on track.

• emacs
• lisp