C.1 Getting Started with Lisp

TLDR; If you’re new to common lisp an easy to use IDE is Portacle.

We recommend the following Common Lisp resources.

• The Getting Started guide provided on CLiki, the Common Lisp wiki.

  This is a fairly complete guide to starting out with Lisp in general and Common Lisp in particular.

• The web site Articulate Common Lisp, includes a comprehensive startup guide and introduction to the lisp language.

  This includes sections on choosing an implementation, using Quicklisp, and defining new libraries with ASDF.

• Practical Common Lisp.

  Especially, Chapter 2 describes how to get Emacs and Slime working.

We strongly recommend that you use Emacs: no other editor has such strong integration into the Lisp process (useful for finding function definitions, automatically displaying information, compiling, highlighting compiler warnings, evaluating, etc...). Install Emacs ParEdit for additional Lisp authoring support.

If you prefer to use VIM, we recommend installing paredit.vim.