Lispbox is a version of Lisp in a Box, which was
originally created by Matthew Danish and Mikel Evins,
customized for use with Practical Common Lisp.
The purpose of Lispbox (and Lisp in a Box) is to get
you up and running in a good Lisp environment as
quickly as possible. When you start Lispbox it launches
the text editor Emacs with SLIME (the Superior Lisp
Interaction Mode for Emacs) already installed and
starts Common Lisp for you. Lisp in a Box is designed
to not interfere with your existing Emacs installation,
if you have one. If you are already an Emacs user, you
may wish to install the no-Emacs version designed to
work with an existing Emacs installation.
For more about what Lispbox is, read on; otherwise hop
over to the download page and start downloading. What
Lispbox gives you
A full Lispbox distribtion contains:
* Emacs, the powerful, customizable text editor
* A Common Lisp implementation of your choosing
* SLIME, the Superior Lisp Integration Mode for
Emacs
* ASDF, Another System Definition Facility, used to
load Common Lisp libraries.
* The practical code from Practical Common Lisp
ready to be loaded using ASDF.
* A bit of glue code to make it all a bit easier to
use.
When you run the Lispbox application it will start
Emacs and start Common Lisp in SLIME and you're ready
to start hacking. You can use ASDF to load the various
libraries and applications from Practical Common Lisp.
Lispbox special features
The environment provided by Lispbox has a few special
features beyond what you'd get from combining Emacs,
SLIME, ASDF, and a Common Lisp implementation. These
features are designed to make it easier to use,
particularly for new Lispers.
* The package CL-USER is "cleaned" of any
implementation-dependent packages. This makes it
easier to follow along the code in the book
(particularly in the early chapters before I've
introduced packages) without running into name
conflicts with names exported from
implementaton-defined packages that might
otherwise be inherited by CL-USER. This does have
the consequence that certain
implementation-specific extensions are not
automatically available. But they can easily be
added back once you know about Common Lisp's
package system.
* Lispbox includes some extensions to ASDF that
modify how it finds ASD files and where it stores
the files generated by COMPILE-FILE. The former
makes it slightly easier to install new Common
Lisp libraries and, more important, provides a
mechanism that works the same on OS X, GNU/Linux,
and Windows. The latter makes it easier to
experiment with different Lisp implementations
since it causes the files generated by
COMPILE-FILE to be placed in an
implementation/operating system/architecture
dependent directory.
