Hey,
I wanted to be able to display images in my SLIME repl, so that I could do stuff like http://collison.ie/img/google-charts.png. I played around with swank.lisp and slime.el for an hour, and hacked together something that mostly works. The code is ugly as sin, but I'm posting it here in case anyone wants to similarly subvert their SLIME installation. If there's any interest in having this be a part of the SLIME distribution, I'm happy to look at cleaning it up...
Patch against CVS slime at collison.ie/code/slime-pictures.patch.
When applied, test it out with something like:
(swank:make-picture :url "http://www.gnu.org/graphics/gnu-head.png" :type 'png)
Cheers,
Patrick