Best Common Lisp IDE [closed]

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.

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.

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....

The most pleasant way I have found of accessing the Common Lisp standard is through Info. Build and install the Info files as described on http://www.phys.au.dk/~harder/dpans.html. Then add the following to your ~/.emacs.el:

(require 'info-look)

(info-lookup-add-help
 :mode 'lisp-mode
 :regexp "[^][()'\" \t\n]+"
 :ignore-case t
 :doc-spec '(("(ansicl)Symbol Index" nil nil nil)))

You can look up the symbol at point with C-h S.

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.