I started with Lisp-in-a-box and it worked pretty well, although I realized that my lisp package involved 3 things:
- An Emacs Compiler
- CLISP
- Slime
With lisp-in-a-box, you aren’t going to get the most current releases of all of these at the same time. So I set out to download my own components. I finally got it working with:
The only thing that I have to do that Lisp-in-a-box did for me was type [alt]-x slime to start it up. I highly recommend writing lisp in this REPL interface. You can actually use the autoformatting to see when you have made a mistake. As you add your closing parms (which everyone hates about LISP), the cursor actually flashed back to its corresponding opening parm. This is really cool. If you think you are finishing a loop, you will see instantly if you are right or not. And did I mention using auto-completion on function or variable names to move faster with less mistakes too?
The only tricky configuration I had to do was create a directory called ‘C:\.emacs.d’ and inside it put a file called ‘init’ with this content (of course you have to figure out your own paths):
(add-to-list ‘load-path “C:\\slime”) ; your SLIME directory
(setq inferior-lisp-program “C:\\Progra~1\\clisp-2.44\\clisp.exe -K full”) ; Lisp
(require ‘slime)
(slime-setup)