Emacs Setup (+ CL Clojure slime)
This page is born out of my struggle the last few days – to setup a working Emacs + CommonLisp + Clojure + Slime/Swank integration. If you are looking for the copy-paste instructions and don’t care about why go on to the Copy Paste Steps section.
A few points about the why…
- Why do I want to use CL and Clojure? a) I want to learn lisp, 2) I want to learn Clojure as everyone’s going to rah-rah about it, c) Land of Lisp – I love the book and am going through all the games one by one.
- Why Emacs? My editor of choice is (was?) TextMate – but the clojure integration leaves something to be desired (comment if you want more details). Tried Netbeans – it has great out-of-box support and I was happy for a few days. But I started missing power-editing (moving around in files/project etc.) – this is when I saw some screencasts of experts using Emacs+Slime+Clojure – and decided #iGottaHaveThat! Read The Grand Tour Clojure IDEs for more details.
Fine… but the “standard” setups didn’t work for you?
There are quite a few great resources that talk about how to set up:
Emacs with Clojure
- The get clojure section at learn-clojure.com is a great summary (basically Emacs + emacs-starter-kit + leiningen)
- StackOverflow: A gentle tutorial to Emacs/Swank/Paredit/Clojure
Emacs with CL
… but what I wanted to setup both with Emacs. And this turned to be hard. After a lot of contacts in the #Clojure IRC channel, with various people and going through a lot of SO questions I still got nowhere. See this question I posted on SO to get the details of what was broken. Basically slime was not connecting to CL as it was using the stripped-down version from ELPA and I was getting this error:
slime-connection: Not connected.
Polling "/var/folders/B9/B9B5.../-Tmp-/slime.3202".. (Abort with `M-x slime-abort-connection'.) [69 times]
Finally spacemanaki provided a working solution. Admittedly this is fragile – but I am willing to live with a fragile setup to have a working one.
However, this combined with what I had already done to this point was a looot of steps – something I probably won’t remember a month from now. Hence…
Enough! Just gimme the copy-paste steps
These steps will work perfectly on a Mac and probably on Linux – for Windows you’ll probably have to do better:
-
Get Emacs
– I chose GNU Emacs – I’ve seen errors on v22 – so make sure you pick at least Emacs 23.2 -
emacs-starter-kit
I have my fork of it (with my own arnab.el and arnab/), suggest you do too (so you can have your customizations shared across machines). I also put it in my .emacs.d dir (if you have a .emacs.d or .emacs you should move them aside):cd ~/.emacs.d git clone your-clone-of-esk -
Symlink esk to .emacs.d
cd ~/.emacs.d ln -sf emacs-starter-kit/* .… a caveat is that if you add new files (no reason you should add files outside of your username dir, but if you do) you’ll need to symlink them again.
-
Check your setup:
Start Emacs – it’ll compile/install stuff – that’s fine. Next start should be clean (no errors) -
Install packages:
M-x package-list-packagesand press i on clojure-mode, slime and slime-repl, then x to start installation -
Check your setup:
Restart Emacs and see that you get no errors. Now let’s hack it to make it work with both CL and Clojure -
Move slime and slime-repl from elpa over:
The elpa provided packages are bare-bone and will not work with CL. So:cd ~/.emacs.d mkdir managed-packages cd managed-packages mkdir slime-from-cvs slime-from-elpa mv ~/.emacs.d/emacs-starter-kit/elpa/slime-20100404.1 ~/.emacs.d/managed-packages/slime-from-elpa mv ~/.emacs.d/emacs-starter-kit/elpa/slime-repl-20100404 ~/.emacs.d/managed-packages/slime-from-elpa -
Get slime from CVS:
cd ~/.emacs.d/managed-packages/slime-from-cvs cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/slime/cvsroot login cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/slime/cvsroot checkout slime -
Restart Emacs
If you see no errors you’re probably all set. Let’s verify by learning how to use these tweaks.
Ok – how do I run CL and/or Clojure now?
What we did was separate out slime-from-cvs and slime-from-elpa and added a bit of ELisp to be able to choose one on interactively – see the arnab/lisp.el. Thanks again spacemanaki for the fix. BTW remember to restart emacs if you want to switch from one to the other. So to use:
CommonLisp
Start emacs, M-x slime-common-lisp. Try C-x C-e, C-c C-k in a .lisp file to see it working.
You might have to turn on slime-mode too (M-x slime-mode) if you see errors like “slime C-c C-k is undefined” when you try to compile-and-load (C-c C-k).
If it’s not working for some reason look at the Messages buffer (C-x b to choose buffers)
Clojure
I went with the leiningen way – but at this point you might get swank-clojure working too (to hack random .clj files, outside of lein projects). But since setting up lein is so easy I went with that.
If you don’t have lein, brew it:
brew install leiningen
which lein # should show it now.
… if you have lost me at this point, check out the super awesome homebrew project.
cd into an existing lein project, or create one (lein new project-name). See that the project.clj defines a development dependency on swank-clojure. If not, add it, like: :dev-dependencies [[swank-clojure "1.2.1"]
lein deps # or lein uberjar
lein swank
… this will start a swank-clojure server on localhost:4005.
Connect to it M-x slime-connect-clojure. Try C-x C-e, C-c C-k in the project’s .clj files to see it working.
That’s it! Enjoy!
Hey, quick question – does Paredit work for you when you enable it inside SLIME? When I followed my own notes to set this up again, and then connect to Clojure or Common Lisp with SLIME, and do M-x enable-paredit-mode, it will insert closing parentheses but will not delete them when it should. Let me know! Thanks!
RE: my previous comment, I figured it out. If you have the same issue, take a look at the Emacs Lisp on this page: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit#toc3
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