Best Common Lisp IDE

Question

I've used Slime within Emacs as my primary development environment for Common Lisp (or Aquamacs on OS X), but are there other compelling choices out there? I've heard about Lispworks, but is that [or something else] worth looking at? Or does anyone have tips to getting the most out of Emacs (e.g., hooking it up to the hyperspec for easy reference)?

Update: Section 7 of Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp give one perspective. But to me, SLIME really seems to be where it's at.

More resources:

• Video of Marco Baringer showing SLIME
• Videos of Sven Van Caekenberghe showing the LispWorks IDE
• Video of Rainer Joswig using the LispWorks IDE to create a DSL
• Blog post by Bill Clementson discussing IDE choices

Solution 1

There are some flashier options out there, but I don't think anything's better than Emacs and SLIME. I'd stick with what you're using and just work on pimping your Emacs install.

Solution 2

A very minimalistic but useful Lisp IDE for Windows is "LispIDE" available from:

http://www.daansystems.com

• Supports CLISP and SBCL.
• Starts up with REPL very quickly.
• Syntax highlighting.
• Download includes CLHS and CLtL2 as CHM help files.
• Press F1 to bring up CLHS help. CLtL2 under Help menu.
• Keyboard shortcuts for "Send to Lisp" and "Macro Expand".

Simple, effective and free.

Solution 3

I'm very late on this, but it's strange that nobody has mentioned the LispWorks IDE here, and it even has some GUI-Builder, which is portable across platforms (minus Mac OS X).

Also if you want a whole operating system for your Lisp programming undertaking, there still does exist Open Genera (which just runs on Dec Alphas (who is currently the owner of DEC ;-(), it's a complete OS written in Lisp and even has a C compiler, implemented in Lisp AFAIK, targeting the OS. It's very strange. You'll find a few things which we nowadays take for granted. E.g hyper referenced documents (but this was before the Web). It has a few "Lisp" dialects and the base is ZetaLisp, but Common Lisp works. All the tools and things can be introspected during runtime. It's a very strange feeling.

However, I just mentioned it. I guess nobody here will ever have touched OpenGenera....

Solution 4

There is a Lisp IDE available with Clozure Common Lisp (née OpenMCL). It looks fine, although I like SLIME better. Clozure, however, is the bees knees: an order of magnitude faster compilation and execution on a 64 bit Intel Mac, and a better "user experience" in general. Look around on common-lisp.net for Rittweiler's new slides on using SLIME, they're very helpful.

Solution 5

I'll second the clozure common lisp IDE on MacOS/X. You'll remember it fondly if you ever used Macintosh Common Lisp. They are working to improve it, and, bonus, you get compete source.

In addition, if you just want lispish, dr-scheme has quite the IDE as well.

View more solutions

Comments

[Brendan Foote]

To learn more, check out these screencasts of Lispworks and its features: homepage.mac.com/svc/LispMovies/index.html

[Geoffrey]

LispWorks is way too expensive.

[Friedrich]

Well there is a free version, I can not see why this can be judged expensive. If you use it commercially than the price also not expensive. Every tools costs money and for what Lispworks provided the price is surely adequate.

[Tripp Lilley]

The 41-slide December 2008 talk is at common-lisp.net/~trittweiler/talks/slime-talk-2008.pdf . There's an additional 8-slide 2009 lightning talk at common-lisp.net/~trittweiler/talks/… .

[ApproachingDarknessFish]

I highly recommend this. It may not be feature-rich, but it's the perfect environment for getting started in lisp.

[MasterMastic]

I agree; it took me a long while to make Emacs work for me, and eventually it was thanks to preconfigured .emacs.d. (for me personally, spacemacs is the way to go).