Run SLIME and CLISP on Windows

Friends! Let me free you from your complicated lives. From the complicated
part, not the lives part. -Bender

I managed to get SLIME and CLISP to play nice on Windows. As is often
the case when trying to get something interesting working on Windows,
I couldn’t find a single comprehensive source that explained
everything. I’ll document what I did here, and maybe that will save
someone else some time.

Oh yeah, and I did know about Lisp in a Box, but that felt like
cheating.

I already had cygwin installed. I did a full install (I had some
time on my hands). So I already had CLISP installed, too.

You’re going to need emacs to run SLIME. I use the Windows emacs
build, rather cygwin’s build. The cygwin build of emacs 22 is pretty
flaky on my machine.

When you go to download SLIME, make sure you grab the cvs tarball
and not the 2.0 tarball. The 2.0 release is not compatible with the
current CLISP release. The SLIME readme contains the magic incantation
to load SLIME into emacs. This goes in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.site-lisp/slime/")  ; your SLIME directory
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/bin/clisp.exe -K full") ; your Lisp system
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

Change the paths so that they work for your system. Make sure that you
leave the “-K full” on the clisp executable.

There’s a path error that occurs if you run SLIME now. This is caused
by the difference between cygwin paths and windows paths. Note that I
don’t use any of that cygpath crap in my .emacs file. I also didn’t
want to write the elisp functions that would make Swank (it’s a SLIME
thing) work. I liked this suggestion from CLiki better:

mkdir /c
touch /c/NOT_MOUNTED
mount C:\\ /c

Start up emacs and run M-x SLIME. You should get the CL-USER> prompt
if everything worked.

I think that’s everything I did. If I missed anything, drop a note in
the comments.