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I appreciate that I'm off the beaten path here, and folks look for a much higher fidelity dev experience than before.

That said, outside of using a bit of LispWorks 20+ years ago, my "dev environment" for Common Lisp is CLISP and Emacs, but not like you think. I use Emacs simply because of TAB to autoindent. (I'm sure vim has something similar, I just haven't bothered to look it up.) I don't use SLIME or anything like that. While I used to be an Emacs user, not so much any more. It's all arrow keys, pg up/pg down, some ^S to search, ^G to stop, mouse to select, Cmd-XVC cut/paste/copy, ^XS to save. And, that's about it. Forget window and buffer management, one and done!

I reload in CLISP, and run everything from there. Relying on the GNU readline interface, the listeners , *, *, etc. Particularly today, it has to be the lowest bandwidth dev experience. I don't even use any of the S-expr manipulation commands in Emacs. Just doesn't get much more advanced than ^D, backspace, ^A, ^E, ^K and ^Y, and relying on paren matching and TAB indention to catch things.

But it works. 99% of the time, I simply abort out of the stacktrace. Very rarely I'll crawl up the stack. I use the time proven "print" debugging "tool". And the listener. LOTS of rinse and repeat.

I don't do huge projects, but they're "thousands" of lines of code. I don't use many libraries (I have quicklisp installed, I just don't use any of them). But I'm not interfacing with anything. It's mostly a bunch of crude simulations and such I dabble with.

Even back with LispWorks I operated this way. My mind doesn't "see" S-exprs like that, it's just lines of characters. But, I don't think it slows me down. Learning SLIME, scaling the wall of the "sane development environment", yea, it's steep. It's why I haven't scaled it.

Simply, I want to get stuff done, not fight the tools. So, I get stuff done with my stone knives and bear skins "IDE".

The language has value, and power, and is very useful outside of its dev environment.




You might want to setup Slime using Quicklisp and give it a really good try. Simple interface to learn, especially if you use Emacs menus and don’t try to memorize all the command key combinations.




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