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Which editor do you use for Lisp?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#11

Post by nablaone »

ecuzzillo wrote: post #5
palish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard the name. I didn't know you could specifically write Lisp in it. Thanks. Is that the only one?

Emacs is the best. It's written in an old dialect of Lisp itself, and you can customize it and script sequences of actions in it with Lisp. It also has SLIME, which is the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, (see http://common-lisp.net/project/slime/), which is the most amazing IDE I have ever seen for any language, and I've used VS.NET and Eclipse and all the rest. That's for Common Lisp (CL), which you may or…

CL - SLIME

Scheme - quack.el (http://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/) Not so powerfull as SLIME.

AFAIK there was a support for scheme (scheme48) in SLIME. I don't know a status of it.

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#12

Post by mqt »

pg mentioned that he uses vi with a REPL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=587 ).

I recently began using emacs + SLIME for writing Lisp and revert back to vim for everything else. I've also tried vim + VIlisp.vim, which sends Lisp code to a running Lisp interpreter. It seemed pretty decent though I don't really have enough experience writing Lisp to really compare.

Anyone else write Lisp in vi?

SLIME is great, but I really miss vim sometimes. Fortunately, Slim-Vim is in the works by the author of VIlisp.vim. Here's a couple comment pages on Lisp with vi/emacs:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1cij7/comments

http://www.lemonodor.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=689

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#13

Post by Goladus »

palish wrote: post #4
kmt wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't heard of emacs?

I've heard the name. I didn't know you could specifically write Lisp in it. Thanks. Is that the only one?

Here are some links I found helpful when starting out:

http://puggy.symonds.net/~deep/emacside.html - "Emacs as your IDE" (A quick start summary of core commands)

And if you find inspiration useful:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-save-excursion.html

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/06/shiny-and-new-emacs-22.html

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#14

Post by herdrick »

It sounds like you're used to editing files in Windows. So your hands are accustomed to standard Windows way of selecting text, cutting, copying and pasting. Emacs does not do things this way, not at all. You can google for "cua.el", a chunk of elisp that customizes Emacs to do that stuff in a much more Windows-ish way. It's definitely not identical though. There's also some elisp out there that makes Emacs scroll one line at a time, instead of ten lines or whatever stone age thing it does by default.

If you want the least pain in getting started with a lisp, I recommend PLT Scheme. Its editor, DrScheme, will seem very ordinary and familiar. That's not a win in the long run, but in the short run you can learn how to hack a lisp, Scheme in this case, without simultaneously retraining your hands and eyes to use Emacs. And learning a lisp is what you really want to do, believe me. I was in your shoes not too long ago, and this is what I did.

(And PLT Scheme is great.)

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#15

Post by vikram »

palish wrote: post #2

Programming consists of a few things. An editor, a compiler, source control, and so on. The editor is particularly important when it comes to being productive. I'm inexperienced with Lisp, and I've found a few things inside Visual Studio that I feel particularly reluctant to part with. "Go to Implementation" is one. I just move the mouse over a function call, press alt-G, and it takes me right to where that function…

Shawn,

Try emacs with slime. I think Bill Clementson's Blog has a link to a movie which shows the power of it. I use Visual Studios for my day job. And its poor when compared to emacs+slime. Not only can you goto source code of any function in list by doing Esc-. I really enjoy the fuzzy complete facility. type in a few letters and slime comes up with a likely match for functions you might want to call.

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#16

Post by tritchey »

You might want to also check out a Lisp plugin for Eclipse called Cusp ( http://paragent.com/lisp/cusp/cusp.htm ). There are builds for Windows available. The other Tim that programs here at Paragent developed it, and uses it as his main development environment (I'm an emacs/slime guy). It reuses parts of slime (the backend swank server) so works in a similar manner. It also comes with SBCL, so you can get up and going pretty quickly.

Regarding SBCL on win32 - it is pretty stable, but is still missing some functionality that SBCL has on other platforms (threads is the big one).

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#18

Post by jey »

mqt wrote: post #12

pg mentioned that he uses vi with a REPL ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=587 ). I recently began using emacs + SLIME for writing Lisp and revert back to vim for everything else. I've also tried vim + VIlisp.vim, which sends Lisp code to a running Lisp interpreter. It seemed pretty decent though I don't really have enough experience writing Lisp to really compare. Anyone else write Lisp in vi? SLIME is great…

Anyone else write Lisp in vi?

Yes, I do all of my text editing in Vim. I <3 Vim.

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#19

Post by jlf »

herdrick wrote: post #14

It sounds like you're used to editing files in Windows. So your hands are accustomed to standard Windows way of selecting text, cutting, copying and pasting. Emacs does not do things this way, not at all. You can google for "cua.el", a chunk of elisp that customizes Emacs to do that stuff in a much more Windows-ish way. It's definitely not identical though. There's also some elisp out there that makes Emacs scroll on…

You can make Emacs scroll a line at a time by adding this to your .emacs:

(setq scroll-conservatively 1)

Re: Which editor do you use for Lisp?

#20

Post by jlf »

vikram wrote: post #15
palish wrote: post #2

Programming consists of a few things. An editor, a compiler, source control, and so on. The editor is particularly important when it comes to being productive. I'm inexperienced with Lisp, and I've found a few things inside Visual Studio that I feel particularly reluctant to part with. "Go to Implementation" is one. I just move the mouse over a function call, press alt-G, and it takes me right to where that function…

Shawn, Try emacs with slime. I think Bill Clementson's Blog has a link to a movie which shows the power of it. I use Visual Studios for my day job. And its poor when compared to emacs+slime. Not only can you goto source code of any function in list by doing Esc-. I really enjoy the fuzzy complete facility. type in a few letters and slime comes up with a likely match for functions you might want to call.

It's definitely worthwhile watching the Slime movie. You can find links to it at http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050728.html
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