Please tell us about your stack. Which implementation of Common Lisp do you use?
Actually its not very fancy. I basically live in a live CL image, have some emacs key bindings which invoke a simple CL job system (EVAL in a thread). I can shift-right-click things to get a menu of actions for that type of file and plain-right-click to run the VIEW action for that type of file (as a job in CL).
http://i.imgur.com/2b47mII.png
I have a QUERY function which is hooked up to Recoll (full text search). I have the HTML ANSI CL draft under /usr/doc/ansi-common-lisp/ and HTML versions of all manpages under /usr/doc/man so finding documentation is quite nice. E.g. I (query "defun") or (query "gethostname") and get a sane list of results.
I have a markdown like language in which I write all my documentation, its media independent and has backends for plaintext, html and LaTeX output. I want to release it soon but well...
There is the SH DSL for executing UNIX commands, the PIPE macro for doing things like (pipe (sh hostname) (read)) (just a silly example).
My web server is open source (telnet to mr.gy on port 80). Its mostly "cute", not something you'd run on a large site.
My time with UNIX also made me fond of text files so a lot of my "stack" is optimized for plain text interfaces (e.g. the email client started because I didn't like the directory structure of maildir). Also I wanted my mail in a git repository.
> Did you build this all from what you thought you'd rather use
Kind of, its a compromise between what I wanted (a CL OS, optimized for simple text interfaces and CL hacking) and what was in reach. At some point I decided to go the path of least resistance, move my CL stack closer to the UNIX/Slackware stack and reuse and integrate as much open source software as possible.
The result is a very thin layer of CL and Elisp code and some CL apps which combine to a UI I feel comfortable with.
It is very encouraging to see you work and I really need to get up to speed on the Lisp.
Also, I am a Recoll fan too. Great stuff!
Have you considered inferior shell for unix commands?
Does your markdown resemble scribe from racket? I have been considering doing that.