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Getting Started With Common Lisp - 2017 Edition

Posted on 2017-11-15

A Short Introduction

This is a short guide to configuring a modest Common Lisp development environment on Ubuntu (and other Debian-based Linuxes), using SBCL as our implementation, Spacemacs as our editor, Quicklisp as our library manager, SLIME for our editor integration, and Linedit to make SBCL's REPL a bit nicer.

Let's Do It

Start out by installing SBCL, emacs, and git using apt:

sudo apt install -y sbcl emacs git

Next, we want to get Quicklisp, so that we can easily install a bunch of other Common Lisp libraries:

wget https://beta.quicklisp.org/quicklisp.lisp
sbcl --load quicklisp.lisp

That second command will drop you into SBCL's REPL. Run the rest in there, treating RET as "hit the RETurn/enter key":

(quicklisp-quickstart:install)
(ql:add-to-init-file)
RET
(ql:quickload :babel)
(ql:quickload :linedit)
(require :sb-aclrepl)

While we have now technically installed Quicklisp and Linedit, neither of them will load by default. Edit your ~/.sbclrc and add the following at the end of the file:

;;; Check for --no-linedit command-line option.
(if (member "--no-linedit" sb-ext:*posix-argv* :test 'equal)
  (setf sb-ext:*posix-argv*
    (remove "--no-linedit" sb-ext:*posix-argv* :test 'equal))
  (when (interactive-stream-p *terminal-io*)
    (require :sb-aclrepl)
    (require :linedit)
    (funcall (intern "INSTALL-REPL" :linedit)
             :wrap-current t
             :eof-quits t
             :history "~/.linedit_history")))

Now that we have SBCL and Quicklisp all configured, let's set up our editor, Spacemacs:

git clone https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs ~/.emacs.d

After finishing the clone, run emacs, either through your graphical interface or by running emacs in a terminal. The Spacemacs layer will begin to automatically configure itself, and will ask you a few questions. My suggested answers are below:

What is your preferred editing style?   Among the stars aboard the Evil flagship (vim)
What distribution of Spacemacs would you like to start with?   The stardard distribution, recommended (spacemacs)
What type of completion framework do you want?   A heavy one but full-featured (helm)

Next, edit your dotfile with SPC f e d (where SPC is the space bar). Remove smartparens from the package-selected-packages list in dotspacemacs/user-config, add common-lisp to the list of layers in the dotspacemacs-configuration-layers list in dotspacemacs/layers, and then install the layer with SPC f e R.

You should now have Spacemacs, SBCL, Quicklisp, Linedit, and SLIME set up. Launch Spacemacs using its Emacs base, run SBCL using sbcl if you just want a bare Common Lisp REPL, invoke Quicklisp from a REPL using (ql:quickload :foo) to install package foo, and launch slime using , ' (comma then single-quote) in a .lisp file (or manually using SPC SPC slime) in Spacemacs.

Happy hacking!