One of the complaints sometimes made about Common Lisp is that, although it has a great, free development environment in Slime, using it involves learning Emacs, which has a steep leaning curve of its own, and whose user interface is full of historical idiosyncrasies.
One way to fix this would be to port Slime to Vim, as has been discussed on this list. But this might seem tantamount to swapping one editor with an ancient and bizarre user interface for another. I think some people would like to use Slime in the context of an editor whose keystrokes are generally familiar from the conventions of most modern applications. For some time I have been distributing a configuration package for Emacs called Easymacs. It attempts to make Emacs behave in a less idiosyncratic fashion, and includes a large number of external packages that would otherwise have to be installed separately. There are various other projects that attempt to something similar, but these all have varying philosophies. To learn more about Easymacs, the web page is here: http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Emacs/Easymacs/index.php I have just released version 1.7, which includes a copy of Slime (from CVS). In Easymacs, function keys 10-12 are reserved for file-type dependent functions, so I have bound these to various Slime functions. For a list, see: http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Emacs/Easymacs/repository/docs/easymacs/Lisp-files.html#Lisp-files Version 1.7 of Easymacs also includes a copy of the draft proposed Common Lisp specification in Texinfo format, thanks to Jesper Harder's dpans2texi. I have fiddled with it a bit, so that it no longer relies on exotic Unicode characters. So you can hit Shift-F1, and get the documentation on the symbol at the cursor, right in Emacs. I find this version easier to use than the Hyperspec, but YMMV. It also includes cldoc.el, which gives arglists and return values for standard Common Lisp functions on the bottom of the screen as you type (and leaves Slime to give them for user-defined functions). I hope this will be of interest to some people who would like to use Slime, bit find Emacs too hard to take. Best wishes, Peter _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
