Trouble setting up Emacs SLIME on PowerPC Mac

Question

I've downloaded and installed Emacs 24.1 on my PowerPC Mac and it works perfectly. And I've just added the Clozure CL to it and that works perfectly too using this tutorial. Now, I want to use SLIME. So I installed the SLIME package by:

1. M-x package-install RET
2. slime RET

SLIME seems to have installed itself into the directory ~/.emacs.d/elpa/slime-20141126.1323. So, I added the following code to my ~/.emacs:

(setq inferior-lisp-program "/Users/haansgruber/lisp/ccl-1.6/dppccl")
;; slime
(add-to-list 'load-path "Users/haansgruber/.emacs.d/elpa/slime-20141126.1323")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)

Then, restarted Emacs to see SWANK loaded SLIME but nothing happened. I entered:

M-x slime

But, this time it gave an error and fell back to inferior-lisp which is Clozure CL as shown below:

There must be some wrong lines on the .emacs config file. There are different .emacs conf lines available on the Internet and I tried several of them and they all ended up more or less with the same error, so I gave up. Could you help me find the solution?

Answer 1

SLIME from package-install can be finicky at times.

Instead:

cd ~/git
git clone https://github.com/slime/slime

and:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/git/slime")
(require 'slime-autoloads)

After this, M-x slime. It will take a short time to compile before the first run. Try sbcl if Clozure doesn't work (I'm using sbcl and I just installed it on my laptop).

Answer 2

The solution that works starts off with the lines abo-abo has given, that is

downloading the SLIME package:

cd ~/git
git clone https://github.com/slime/slime

and adding these to ~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/git/slime")
(require 'slime-autoloads)

and additionally add this line to ~/.emacs, assuming sbcl is installed into /usr/local/bin

(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/local/bin/sbcl")

If you only do the above, you end up with an Emacs running SLIME on the background. To have the SLIME come to the foreground you should add these lines to ~/.emacs

Source: franz.com/emacs/slime.lhtml

(eval-after-load "slime"
  '(progn
    (add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/local/slime/contrib")
    (slime-setup '(slime-fancy slime-banner))
    (setq slime-complete-symbol*-fancy t)
    (setq slime-complete-symbol-function 'slime-fuzzy-complete-symbol)))

Having added those lines, restarted Emacs and entered M-x slime I finally got what I wanted:
_{(source: hizliresim.com)}