Which editor do you use for Lisp? | Hacker News Reader

Which editor do you use for Lisp?

13 pointspalish23 comments

It sounds like you're used to editing files in Windows. So your hands are accustomed to standard Windows way of selecting text, cutting, copying and pasting. Emacs does not do things this way, not at all. You can google for "cua.el", a chunk of elisp that customizes Emacs to do that stuff in a much more Windows-ish way. It's definitely not identical though. There's also some elisp out there that makes Emacs scroll one line at a time, instead of ten lines or whatever stone age thing it does by default.

If you want the least pain in getting started with a lisp, I recommend PLT Scheme. Its editor, DrScheme, will seem very ordinary and familiar. That's not a win in the long run, but in the short run you can learn how to hack a lisp, Scheme in this case, without simultaneously retraining your hands and eyes to use Emacs. And learning a lisp is what you really want to do, believe me. I was in your shoes not too long ago, and this is what I did.

(And PLT Scheme is great.)

You can make Emacs scroll a line at a time by adding this to your .emacs:

(setq scroll-conservatively 1)

Programming consists of a few things. An editor, a compiler, source control, and so on.

The editor is particularly important when it comes to being productive. I'm inexperienced with Lisp, and I've found a few things inside Visual Studio that I feel particularly reluctant to part with. "Go to Implementation" is one. I just move the mouse over a function call, press alt-G, and it takes me right to where that function is defined. Another is a complete list of defined procedures for the current file.

Does Lisp have an environment that has similar features?

Shawn

You haven't heard of emacs?

I've heard the name. I didn't know you could specifically write Lisp in it. Thanks.

Is that the only one?

Emacs is the best. It's written in an old dialect of Lisp itself, and you can customize it and script sequences of actions in it with Lisp. It also has SLIME, which is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, (see http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/), which is the most amazing IDE I have ever seen for any language, and I've used VS.NET and Eclipse and all the rest.

That's for Common Lisp (CL), which you may or may not want to develop in; I personally frequently choose to write in CL because it has a very large library, and because it has SLIME.

For Scheme, Emacs is also good, but there isn't something analogous to SLIME.

SLIME has go-to-definition of a function as one of its more basic features, along with auto-completion, convenient listings of arguments when you first write down a call to a particular function, and much more.

Sounds like just the thing, thank you!

I have a quick question that I can't justify creating a new thread about. Since you brought up Lisp implementations though...

I was about to choose to write my programs with SBCL, but it looks like the Win32 port isn't yet complete. Since I'm aiming towards using Lisp in games, speed is an issue, and so is running on Windows. Would you or anyone reccomend a dialect of Lisp which is fast and runs under Windows? Even just 1/4th the speed of C would be excellent.

Ask on the #lisp IRC channel on freenode about whether the SBCL win32 port is complete enough for your purposes. It's coming along. Remember to ask your question and then leave the chat idling, so that if your question isn't answered right away, people who have left it idling and then come back to it can see your question and then answer it.

I believe CLISP runs on Windows. I have no idea whether this is at all practical, since I don't use Windows, but maybe you could use a Unix emulator like Cygwin and run SBCL (and your game) in that, invisibly to the user?

Heh, creative. I'll investigate that. Thanks!

Chicken Scheme compiles to C. It's also directly supported by SWIG, so it's (reasonably) easy to call functions in C DLLs and the like.

Naturally, as a reader of YC news, I have also looked into LISP again lately. While I haven't really tried it yet, I found a LISP plugin for eclipse that is running SBCL on Windows. They claim to be inspired by SLIME. Not sure if it would be possible to get their SBCL to run on Windows standaline, but i was planning to use that plugin (sorry no link, but should be easy to Google).

CL - SLIME

Scheme - quack.el (http://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/) Not so powerfull as SLIME.

AFAIK there was a support for scheme (scheme48) in SLIME. I don't know a status of it.

Here are some links I found helpful when starting out:

http://puggy.symonds.net/~deep/emacside.html - "Emacs as your IDE" (A quick start summary of core commands)

And if you find inspiration useful:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-save-excursion.html

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and-new-emacs-22.html

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

CLIMACS is also worth a look.

Shawn,

Try emacs with slime. I think Bill Clementson's Blog has a link to a movie which shows the power of it. I use Visual Studios for my day job. And its poor when compared to emacs+slime. Not only can you goto source code of any function in list by doing Esc-. I really enjoy the fuzzy complete facility. type in a few letters and slime comes up with a likely match for functions you might want to call.

It's definitely worthwhile watching the Slime movie. You can find links to it at http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html

pg mentioned that he uses vi with a REPL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=587 ).

I recently began using emacs + SLIME for writing Lisp and revert back to vim for everything else. I've also tried vim + VIlisp.vim, which sends Lisp code to a running Lisp interpreter. It seemed pretty decent though I don't really have enough experience writing Lisp to really compare.

Anyone else write Lisp in vi?

SLIME is great, but I really miss vim sometimes. Fortunately, Slim-Vim is in the works by the author of VIlisp.vim. Here's a couple comment pages on Lisp with vi/emacs:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1cij7/comments

http://www.lemonodor.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=689

Anyone else write Lisp in vi?

Yes, I do all of my text editing in Vim. I <3 Vim.

I do use vim, too.

Debugging without slime is quite difficult however: as everything is available through slime, nobody cares about simplifying access to SBCL debugging features from outside slime. For example, having to prefix every variable access with SB-DEBUG:VAR when in the debug REPL is a real pain, and serves no purpose other than annoying non-slime users.

You might want to also check out a Lisp plugin for Eclipse called Cusp ( http://paragent.com/lisp/cusp/cusp.htm ). There are builds for Windows available. The other Tim that programs here at Paragent developed it, and uses it as his main development environment (I'm an emacs/slime guy). It reuses parts of slime (the backend swank server) so works in a similar manner. It also comes with SBCL, so you can get up and going pretty quickly.

Regarding SBCL on win32 - it is pretty stable, but is still missing some functionality that SBCL has on other platforms (threads is the big one).

I use my own plugin that I wrote for IntelliJ (Java IDE). I've been using IntelliJ for so long that I just like the feel of it, so I chose to do that rather than learn a new tool. I only whack Lisp code for fun, so it works OK for me.

is your plugin available anywhere?

I tried just defining a .lisp filetype in IDEA, but it doesn't work because it treats apostrophes as string delimiters.

I use Windows Lispworks' IDE, but it is disappointing. I'm going to move to SLIME as soon as possible.

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