SLIME Video Inspiration

I finally got around to watching Marco Baringer's famous SLIME movie. Good job, Marco! It's not perfect, but it is one hell of a way to show off just how good SLIME is. Yes it does kick ass. As a result of watching the movie, I was inspired to give TRAMP a try. My normal method for editing my web pages is to use ssh to log into my web server and then use a terminal emacs (as in the equivalent of emacs -nw) to edit my html. For this entry, I'm using Carbon Emacs to remotely do the same job with TRAMP. Since I'm using GNU Emacs from CVS, I didn't even have to do anything to enable this feature. It was available "out of the box" all along!

I haven't been brave enough to attempt running SLIME over ssh port forwarding yet. To get that to work, I will have to set some things up on my server side. Because my web server is powered by a 566Mhz Celeron processor, I'm half tempted to compile swank into the sbcl core image. I say half tempted because I do update SLIME from CVS on a fairly sporadic basis. Each time I update SLIME would mean creating a new core image. Not that that is such a big deal, it's just a bit of extra work for rather little reward.

Another thing I've decided to try is font-lock-mode. That is Emacs speak for syntax highlighting. One thing I did not want to do is mess around piecemeal with Emacs' font settings. What to do? Simple. I asked on #lisp or #emacs (I forget which) and was pointed to color-theme.el, a third party Emacs package that does exactly what I want. All I had to do was pick one of the many available themes. This turned out to be fairly simple as most of them are quite nasty looking. I'm using the theme called color-theme-clarity. It is well named. Some people may hate having a black background with light text. I'm neutral on the issue. What I didn't like was with the default mode, much of the highlighted text was too light to be on a white background. It is important for text to be easy on the eyes. This theme seems to do it for me without looking like a Christmas tree.

The results can be seen elsewhere on my site. If you go to my Lisp on OS X page, you can see my .emacs file and downlaod it for your own purposes. Oh, I forgot to mention that I can also now run multiple lisps at once. Joy! I also have a couple of screen shots of the new look, along with Marco's movie, on my Lisp Development page. One other thing I would like to mention is Taylor Campbell's paredit.el package. Paredit provides, as an independent implementation, a number of the structured editing features that Marco shows off in his video. It's a package worth looking at if you do a lot of Lisp editing. Paredit is a good complement to SLIME.

It almost looks like I've been busy.