Up and running with Emacs, sbcl, and SLIME

While I normally program in Python, a part of me wants to quickly hack some lisp code every now and then. Especially during those long minutes when my automated tests are running.

I realized that long neglect had left me without a working lisp setup. Here is how I got it up and running again.

Step 1: Get rid of system lisp and slime

The version of sbcl and SLIME in my Ubuntu system is not recent enough for my liking. So I get rid of them:

$ sudo apt-get -y remove sbcl slime common-lisp-controller
$ sudo apt-get -y autoremove # get rid of packages we don't need anymore
$ sudo rm -rf /var/cache/common-lisp-controller

Step 2: Install common requirements

cd ~/
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install emacs22
sudo apt-get -y install cvs
sudo apt-get -y install git-core
sudo apt-get -y install darcs
sudo apt-get -y install subversion
sudo apt-get -y install build-essential
sudo apt-get -y install autoconf
sudo apt-get -y install curl
sudo apt-get -y install sbcl
sudo apt-get -y install texinfo
sudo apt-get -y install tetex-bin
sudo apt-get -y install xloadimage

Step 3: Get clbuild

$ mkdir lisp
$ cd lisp
# for fresh install of clbuild
$ darcs get http://common-lisp.net/project/clbuild/clbuild
$ cd clbuild
# Or, to update existing clbuild
$ cd clbuild
$ darcs pull

Step 4: Get latest SBCL

$ ./clbuild update sbcl
$ cd source/sbcl
$ sh make.sh
$ cd doc/manual
$ make
$ cd ../..
$ echo > ~/.sbclrc
(require :asdf)
(push "/home/parijat/lisp/clbuild/systems/" asdf:*central-registry*)
^D
$

Step 5: Setup SLIME

$ ./clbuild update slime

Now, we need to add this slime configuration to our .emacs file:

(push "/home/parijat/lisp/clbuild/source/slime" load-path)
;; Common Lisp Mode
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/local/bin/sbcl")
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.lisp$" . lisp-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.cl$" . lisp-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.asd$" . lisp-mode))
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)
(eval-after-load "slime"
 '(progn
    (setq slime-complete-symbol*-fancy t
          slime-complete-symbol-function 'slime-fuzzy-complete-symbol
          slime-when-complete-filename-expand t
          slime-truncate-lines nil
          slime-autodoc-use-multiline-p t)
    (slime-setup '(slime-fancy slime-asdf))
    (define-key slime-repl-mode-map (kbd "C-c ;")
      'slime-insert-balanced-comments)
    (define-key slime-repl-mode-map (kbd "C-c M-;")
      'slime-remove-balanced-comments)
    (define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-c ;")
      'slime-insert-balanced-comments)
    (define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-c M-;")
      'slime-remove-balanced-comments)
    (define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "RET") 'newline-and-indent)
    (define-key slime-mode-map (kbd "C-j") 'newline)))
(add-hook 'lisp-mode-hook (lambda ()
                           (cond ((not (featurep 'slime))
                                  (require 'slime)
                                  (normal-mode)))
                           (indent-tabs-mode nil)
                           (pair-mode t)))

Note: pair-mode is a nice package for inserting balanced parentheses, quotes, braces and square-brackets, etc., which I installed earlier by hand.

Now we can launch emacs, and start slime with “M-x slime”.

Caveat

For some reason, after doing the above, slime would still not start. Doing a “M-x slime” would throw me into the sbcl debugger with the error message that sbcl could not find “/usr/share/common-lisp/systems/slime/swank-loader.lisp”, or something like that (I could be wrong about the exact path). After much head-scratching (and grepping my ~/lisp directory), I figured out I had to change the emacs customization variable slime-backend. This can be done by doing “M-x customize-group RET slime-lisp RET” and changing the value of “Slime Backend” to simply “swank-loader.lisp” (the file should be in the same directory as “slime.el”). We can also give an absolute path to the file. I found that the value of this variable was set wrongly (an artifact of using apt-get installed slime, I guess) and hence sbcl was not able to load the correct file.

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