I was using Emacs to do some Lisp code browsing the other day. Along the way, I was trying to jump around to some definitions. I tried using M-. but the code had not been compiled or loaded into the inferior Lisp process. As a result, SLIME complained that it didn't know about the defun I was looking for. I turned off SLIME mode and generated a tags file using standard emacs. Using standard emacs Lisp-mode, I was able to browse the definitions using the tags file.
So, the question is, is it possible for SLIME to fall back to using the tags file like emacs Lisp-mode when it's standard behavior fails?
Now, I could just go around turning off slime-mode every time I load a file, but that's really a pain. Since I have set up a mode hook, every Lisp file loads with slime-mode by default, which is how I want things most of the time when I'm developing. The problem is when trying to browse a library. Even if you turn slime-mode off for one file, it turns itself back on as soon as you use M-. with standard lisp-mode.