Quick recipe on preparing a Lisp environment

Written at 10 May 2016 — tagged as lisp

Some time ago I studied a little of Lisp for fun, and recently I found this lisp game jam. Jumping into graphics could be an overkill, so if I ended up participating with a text based game. There is a C lib to easily handle a terminal, and it looks like some folk made a wrapper to lisp. Thanks to people at #lispgames @freenode, very helpful.

In this post, I’ll show the steps I followed in order to configure my environment with Lisp, Emacs and package managers. I won’t cover the steps in detail, but just plainly list them in order to help me in further installations.

Installing SBCL

Go to the SBCL page and download latest version. Unzip at /opt and execute the install script inside.

Installing Emacs

Emacs is available directly from most Linux distribution repositories.

Installing QuickLisp

To install QuickLisp, read their starter guide, it’s quick and gave me no problems.

Installing Slime

Now is when the problems come. I remember this part specially being difficult to accomplish in the past when retaking Lisp, but this time was lighter thanks to people at #lispgames. Basically there is a helper that does all the hard work for us.

Add MELPA repositories to emacs

Add these lines to .emacs:

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/"))
(package-initialize)

Last words

I did not finish the game but I had a good time refreshing and using Lisp. The game code can be found at github.