January 29, 2004
The Ideal OS X IDE for Lisp

Brian Mastenbrook has started the mac-lisp-ide mailing list, “to encourage discussion about what a true, native Mac OS X ide for Common Lisp development would look and feel like, and to encourage the coding of such an IDE.”

He says

Topics of discussion should include but not be limited to:

  • Built in Emacs-like editor, based on CL
  • Socket connection to other Lisps, perhaps non-Common Lisps (Scheme)
  • Debugging and backtracing
  • Presentation-based GUIs using Cocoa
  • Object clipboard and REPL history
  • Integrated documentation
  • Threading
Posted by jjwiseman at January 29, 2004 10:56 AM
Comments

Am I a bad person if I want to edit Lisp with vim?

Posted by: scott on January 30, 2004 02:04 PM

no it only means you haven't seen the light yet. :)
being able to change things in your editor/ide with the same language you are using to write your applications, without having to compile it, is one of the coolest things i know.

Posted by: tekai on January 30, 2004 03:45 PM

ELisp really isn't Common Lisp though.

Posted by: Bruce Nagel on January 30, 2004 06:58 PM

ELisp is not CL, but there are several packages (cl, eieio, ...) that make it taste quite close. Regarding VIM, I must confess that I prefer vi-style keybindings to Emacs-style, so I use "viper-mode" most time. For me it is the best "big brother" of vi, far before VIM and Elvis.

Posted by: artime on January 31, 2004 03:20 AM

There are emacs-like editors (e.g. Fred, Hemlock, Alpaca, Zmacs) implemented in Common Lisp. Actually, Zmacs is probably written mostly in Zetalisp, but is extensible in Common Lisp. As the previous comment said, it's nice to be able to use Common Lisp both for application programming and for customizing the editor.

Posted by: mikel evins on January 31, 2004 07:48 AM

In the Dynamic Language Wizard talks, Paul Graham mentioned that he edits his code in vi and pastes it into a repl.

Amazing.

Posted by: fn on February 10, 2004 06:55 AM

Is it so wrong if I think emacs is the devil and prefer a mostly OS standard text editing window? Syntax highlighting and that neat tab thing, sure, but not all of us have a unix background or care to learn to edit with emacs.

Posted by: Wes on February 10, 2004 07:47 AM

Paul Graham edits in vi and pastes into a repl? At least I'm in good company. Back when I was in school one of my professors suggested that students learn one of vi or Emacs just in case you had to edit a file on a UNIX system via telnet or ssh. I first chose Emacs, but didn't like c-x c-s to save c-p, c-n, c-b and c-f for navigation, etc. Seemed too much of a pain (plus my pinkies started getting sore), so I gave vim a try and found it much easier to deal with (once you got use to working in a modal environment). Now when I edit Lisp code, I edit in vim (or gvim) and do the copy paste thing into my repl. Recently I downloaded the VIlisp.vim package (http://vim.sourceforge.net/scripts/script.php?script_id=221) by Larry Clapp, and it seems to work really well. I would really like to have a vi like editor that is written in CL, and have been tempted to try viper-mode, but have heard it isn't quite the same as vim. Maybe I'll try it tonight.

Posted by: Benjamin on December 6, 2005 01:56 PM
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