CLIM

The Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) is a Lisp-based programming interface specification that provides a layered set of portable facilities for constructing GUIs. These include basic windowing, input, output, and graphics services; stream-oriented input and output extended with facilities such as output recording, presentations, and context sensitive input; high level "formatted output" facilities; application building facilities; command processing; and a compositional toolkit similar to those found in the X world that supports look and feel independence.

McCLIM is a Free Software implementation of CLIM

Information about CLIM:

• A Guided Tour of the Common Lisp Interface Manager published in 1991 by Lisp Pointers (alternate gzipped PostScript and PDF versions) (Wayback Machine copies: .ps.gz, .pdf)
• Overview of CLIM abstraction layers by Duncan Rose (seems to be down, maybe it was this mail, but I can't find what the other URL refers to)
• CLIM2 Specification
• An annotatable version of the specification, hosted by Gilbert Baumann.
• McCliki a Wiki for McClim
• User's guide (from Xanalys)
• Another User Guide, this one from Franz
• CLIM Layout Protocol for Dummies by Gilbert Baumann (occasionally unavailable, try later)
• User Interface Management Systems: The CLIM Perspective (used to be here)
• Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log: Lisp blog with frequent CLIM content
• A tutorial by Jason Kantz
• A short but useful description of CLIM's command loop and interaction styles (

comp.lang.lisp article)

New Architectural Models for Visibly Controllable Computing: The Relevance of Dynamic Object Oriented Architectures and Plan Based Computing Models (see section 7 "CLIM: Presentation Based Interfaces" on page 31)

Quicksilver: Text Interfaces Beyond Launching: blog entry by Brian Mastenbrook about text interfaces and CLIM (his site died, and he has resurrected it here ; the document can be found with the Wayback Machine Internet Archive )

CLIM in the CMU Lisp repository

clim-request@bbn.com, subscribe to the CLIM Mailing list. List archive:

• from 1990 to 1992
• from 1996

TUNES Project general CLIM principles overview. Also contains a link to Eugene Ciccarelli Ph.D. thesis's (which was the embryo for CLIM.)

Presentation-Based User Interfaces, MIT AI TR 794 (presents -- no pun intended -- the concepts on which CLIM is based)

CLIM history thread in

comp.lang.lisp (January 2005)

CLIM2WWW is a project where CLIM applications were retrofitted to work on the web.

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