SLT – A Common Lisp Language Plugin for Jetbrains IDE Lineup | Hacker News Reader

SLT – A Common Lisp Language Plugin for Jetbrains IDE Lineup

github.com

134 pointsgjvc28 comments

Oh that's awesome! I've come to actually use the Jetbrains programs since they introduced the New UI. It clearly feels very VS Code inspired but I'm glad it's no longer a weird mess of UI all over the place. Now it's a nice IDE for C and Lisp :)

I’m currently trying the new UI, but find it slower to work with than the old one. It has many things hidden behind menus now, which makes the UI prettier but less effective.

Yeah I totally understand that. I do have to give them credit though because everything is still technically "reachable with the same steps". For example, I was reading a help article which went like go to "X > Y > Z" menu. And in the new UI it was surprisingly exactly the same way to get there as in the old one.

Redesigns will always be controversial, especially with tech-people. Personally, I quite enjoy the redesign.

Use keyboard shortcuts and then search for the command:

I use these a lot:

- search everywhere, code actions, etc.: double shift

- find action: Cmd shift a, or ctrl shift a

I hope that it still works in the new ui, didn’t test it yet.

> double shift

Who the hell decided that it's a good combination for a shortcut? I just press it occasionally.

I think it's easier to press than anything more conventional (and also super-easy to remember). This fast and smart jumping around function is one of the biggest things I miss when I use Emacs — and the shortcut is an important part of the experience.

> I just press it occasionally.

Wouldn't that be a big problem only if it was something more destructive than a search popup?

P.S. But I may have a weird perspective on shortcuts: the one I have sweared about pressing accidentally more than once is Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. For the unfamiliar: it's an emergency way to kill the X server (=> the entire graphical user session), nowadays usually disabled by default.

You can change it. I assign to ctrl+shift+p like vscode

This is really really cool.

Cursive (the plugin for Clojure) is already a work of art.

I think the UI for fleet was a huge step forward, unfortunately fleet is not ready for any real work, but you can replicate most of UI in vsCode

IntelliJ has a new UI as well, which is more VSCode-like.

I personally don't like it due to the excessive amount of whitespace (form > function), but it's good to have the choice!

I think the new UI in IntelliJ is a "patch" to keep from bleeding users. The UI in the final form of their next gen ui (Even now, Fleet is a much more polished implementation IMO). So much so, that recreated a lot of it in vsCode.

That is cool. On rare occasion I need to use Clojure for work projects, and then I really like Cursive + IntelliJ. That is an existence proof that a Common Lisp plugin + IntelliJ could be awesome.

I paid $3500 for a LispWorks Pro license and so far I have been paying the $750/year maintenance fee. It is really nice, but as I find myself using Python much more than Common Lisp, I might drop paying maintenance and eventually go back to SBCL. Even with LispWorks I usually use Emacs + Slime.

Anyway, this new SLT plugin is in my “must play with” list. Thanks to the developers.

As someone that can't stand Python anymore and is learning Common Lisp, care to clarify why have you gone the other way?

He is using Python scientific libraries for his new work.

(ps: can't stand python anymore either)

That is correct. I prefer Lisp languages, but if I can get something done much faster using Python because of library availability then I will roll with Python.

Amazing stuff! Really excited to try this out. Common Lisp is a beast of a language.

w.r.t. "THIS PLUGIN IS EXPERIMENTAL and can crash at any time! Please report all bugs!", there are quite a few existing plugins that capture exceptions from their plugin and send those error reports in some automated way (email, Sentry, I think one even had a GitHub issues action using an api token): https://plugins.jetbrains.com/intellij-platform-explorer/ext...

I mention this because (a) automated error reports are able to carry context with them that less experienced bug reporters might not know to send (b) it's a pet peeve of mine when an app asks me to gather up version and platform info that it already knows

This is the gory details: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/blob/idea/22...

Some people resent having information from their computer sent to someone else without their consent (merely using the plugin does not count as proper consent).

And based on demographics, that's probably going to be a much higher percentage of this group than in other groups.

A checkbox (off by default) to enable automated reporting would probably fly with most people though.

It's not without consent, it still requires two user-initiated actions: clicking on the red error icon in the bottom tray, then pushing "Submit" on the resulting dialog

Apologies if my use of "automated way" was interpreted as "automatic way"

Gotcha, I did interpret it that way. No big deal. Exact meaning is hard through text sometimes.

You have a good day.

Oh, thank goodness. If Common Lisp is going to grow as a language, it needs much better tooling than Emacs+SLIME. JetBrains is best-of-breed in development environments; integrating well with it or Visual Studio Code is a must for any language or framework today.

Lispworks and Allegro exist for decades, both definitely better than Emacs + SLIME.

And prohibitively expensive. You can't position CL as an alternative to, say, Node when the only decent IDE for developing in it costs thousands of dollars.

First there are cheaper license options, second, each one gets the tooling they are willing to pay for.

Even street performers pay for their tools, even if it is from some second hand place or street bazar.

Bazar doesn't mean one gets to take what is on the stands.

Sure, you can get nerfed tools at lower license tiers. But if you can get full tooling with a UI that's more modern than Windows XP for some other language for less, why not pay less? This is why Lisp got its lunch ate in the 90s: Lisp vendors vastly overestimated the willingness of developers to pay dearly for Lisp when they can get 80% of Lisp for no or much more reasonable cost.

They underestimated the success of UNIX workstations, which weren't properly cheap, even though they got the UNIX source for peanuts.

In any case the original comment wasn't about software prices, thus the goal has been moved for quite a bit.

Good luck! I actually wanted to implement many months ago and thought I did not have the expertises...

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