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Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

An unrelated question. For those using Vim, what plugins do you use to get a SLIME-like development environment?

I have read great things about SLIME and how it helps in hot-reloading code into a Lisp REPL using Emacs. But is it necessary to learn Emacs to do Lisp? Are the plugins for Vim good enough?

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I use evil-mode in emacs with the emacs lisp interface that works with Franz's Allegro Common Lisp.

I really like it, and do the vast majority of my development in it as a common lisp developer.

It's no longer support and has some bugs, so I've been meaning to set up SLIME, but a previous developer gave me a config that worked out of the box, so I've been using that.

I don't use vim, but supposedly Paul Graham, the creator of this site uses vim for lisp. You really don't need that many fancy tools. Vim already has a visual hint for matching parens. It's nice to load stuff into the lisp image while you are typing but a quick keybind to switch to an external REPL and reload a file gets the job done.

Linux was crafted with just a basic editor, no IDE features. Unix was crafted without even a display to see the code being typed. Fancy tools are nice but not required.

But that said, SLIME in Emacs is the best. It's macro expansion buffer with really helps to understand what a macro does, or make things clear while crafting your own macros. Auto completion is great, although it only works for what is loaded int he live image, it doesn't scan source files for completion like a traditional IDE. Just load everything and completion is great.

I started learning Common Lisp in vim with slimv, which works pretty well. After a while, I switched to emacs with evil-mode, because I could port my vim config to emacs pretty easily by finding emacs plugins for equivalent extensions.

Slimv is great. I have recently written a blog post comparing Slimv and Vlime (two SLIME-like plugins for Vim): https://susam.in/blog/lisp-in-vim-with-slimv-or-vlime/.

I posted it to Hacker News too but it did not get enough traction. The comparison table is towards the end of the post. Overall, I prefer Slimv because it supports Scheme and Clojure as well.

Reshared: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735148

You could use Spacemacs (emacs + vim) with slime.

Vlime is good enough.

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