SLIME
SLIME is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs. This is an ILISP-like development environment intended for maximum integration with CMUCL (also works with SBCL, OpenMCL and work is ongoing on Lispworks and current CVS version of CLISP and CLISP 2.32 on Linux; there is also support packaged separately for Scheme48, called SLIME48).

SLIME is now stable and released. Please download the latest version from its home page. Documentation is included there. NOTE: slime-2.0 is too old for use with current versions of SBCL. Fetch slime from CVS.

Want to try SLIME? Check out the SLIME-HOWTO or read about the SLIME Features. You can also check out some SLIME Tips.

Users are invited to post feature suggestions on this page.

  • Ability to pin certain things (arglist info, debugger, repl) into dedicated frames for nice multi-window operation -- Zach
  • Make the slime faces inherit from the standard font-lock faces when appropriate (eg making the REPL output face inherit from font-lock-comment-face) -- Brian
  • Note: Although it is possible to connect to a Lisp on a remote machine, we haven't yet figured out what does and doesn't work without a shared filesystem. Maybe this can be made tramp-aware? -- Rahul Jain Clear *use-dedicated-output-stream* before connecting works for me so far. -- ngps
  • Autodetection of LINEDIT (or other random REPL wrappers) and calling LINEDIT's UNINSTALL-REPL before running SWANK. I tried to add something in slime-maybe-start-lisp in slime.el to do so, but comint-proc-query was uncooperative and kept hanging. -- James A. Crippen
  • Some REPL conveniences, such as ILISP's C-z P (set package).
    The SLIME equivalent of the latter is
SLIME-REPL-SET-PACKAGE, anything else?
  • Some way to get a REPL in the current debugger frame, for more serious playing around
    I second the motion. It would be very useful to keep a record of what was evaluated and what printed, sort of like a ... read-eval-print loop! It's amazing that this crucial feature of Lisp was discarded in the SLIME model; its absence really detracts from usability. Drew McDermott -- 2005-12-09.
    I would also very much like this feature! -Lars Rune Nøstdal
  • Working symbol-completion when you enter expressions in the mini-buffer
  • "Getting ILISP working was a nightmare. Getting SLIME working was a breeze, even though I had to check it out of CVS" (Steve Jenson, saladwithsteve.com)
  • If your connection to ssh forwarded swank server doesnt work, try to (setf swank::*use-dedicated-output-stream* nil)
  • Maybe: Visit a file "through" the lisp process: slime instructs lisp process to open the file and squirt it across connection back to an emacs buffer. When buffer is saved in emacs, squirt back to lisp process. Potentially very nice for long-lived lisp server processes (provided your slimeswank is a secure channel!), and skirts the whole path-translations thing: the only correct path is the path the lisp process uses i.e. you're not doing C-xC-f emacs-file-path, you're doing C-cC-xC-f (or something saner) CL-file-path. (obviously, you'd provide tab completion for CL-file-path, too ;-) ) See the variable `file-name-handler-alist' for how you might want to do this.
  • How about unified directory access! I know there are some packages out there, but it would be wonderful to have this come with slime. It would be nice to have it as a part of the development environment. It's hard for me to switch between different implementations of CL otherwise. (for example,
    • (:cd "dir") doesn't work when using SLIME with OpenMCL...) Update: I found directory functionality by typing a comma then entering 'cd' into the minibuffer. SLIME RULES!
  • It would be nice if I could have fixed Emacs windows for different SLIME buffers. Like, if I evaluate something and the debugger pops up, I never know where it's going to be (I usually have several Emacs frames and windows open). I would like to say "this will be the REPL window, and I want nothing else there" -- another window for the debugger, another for Lisp code etc. - You can kind of do this with the Emacs Code Browser, if you tell it the repl is a compilation window. It provides a fixed and togglable compilation window at the bottom of the first frame.

    • To add a note about using the standard font-lock faces, the keywords from the appropriate mode should also be used. That is, SLIME should use the lisp-mode-font-lock-keywords-... variables. I have diffrerent ones for Common Lisp, Scheme, and Emacs Lisp, so it would be nice to have this customizable for SLIME. Or better yet, since Emacs's default keywords for Lisp are pretty ELisp-centric maybe SLIME should provide its own set of Common Lisp--centric font-lock keywords, leaving the user to decide whether to copy those for Emacs's Lisp-mode or not. -- James A Crippen

    Sounds a good idea to me. Can you post the code you use somewhere so we can use it as a basis? -- Luke Gorrie

    Some responses..

    A "Recent Changes" popup: Can you elaborate a bit? The ChangeLog file + the mailing list is supposed to fill this role, but feedback about the effectiveness would be appreciated. -- Luke Gorrie

    It might be nice to just add a link to the latest ChangeLog in CVS, like so Latest ChangeLog. Stick that on the project home page. -- James A Crippen Good idea. ChangeLog and mailing lists are now linked.

    Re: "Recent Changes Popup": Especially with the daily ChangeLog diff on the list, this is a solved problem for me at least. I suspect that people following the CVS, but not the list deserve to lose (like I did...). OTOH: I can imagine having a busy month, then updating SLIME, and not noticing all the new goodies. ;) So in the bells and whistles department, SLIME offering to show it's own ChangeLog since last update would be kind of neat -- but definitely not a priority.

    As far as using slime remotely: if you have a shared filesystem but not with identical mountpoints, the patch included in this mail provides you with a M-x slime-replace-prefix function which causes a few uses of filenames to be translated (but only in the emacs->lisp direction).

    The full cygwin-windows cycle is translated by these hooks, working for any cygwin mountpoint. --ReiniUrban

    There is the beginnings of MP (threading) support in SLIME CVS. See the mailing list for details

    Slime Distributions

    Information, for fetching the source distribution, is available at the Slime homepage.

    For fetching Slime via cvs, information is available, also, at the Slime homepage.

    Debian packages

    Slime has got an official Debian package.

    It is under the non-free section of Debian mostly because of the license of one file (xref.lisp). So, should it stay on CLiki.net? -- alceste@NOSPAM.muvara.org

    Mac OS X

    A fink package for Mac OS X (10.3) is also available in fink's unstable tree.

    Slime is available in MacPorts, current port is based on 20110419 CVS snapshot.