Hi Orm,

The two key functions at play here are slime-autodoc (contrib/slime-autodoc.el) on the elisp side and swank:autodoc on the CL side (contrib/swank-arglists.lisp). For testing, use slime-autodoc-manually instead of slime-autodoc-space to avoid that ^M. When you reach the point where slime-autodoc is not working, evaluate slime-autodoc with stepping enabled (C-u C-M-x). If nothing fishy shows up there, the next place to look at would be the swank side, then slime-autodoc--async% (elisp) which is what handles the SWANK reply; you might want to step through that as well.

Good luck; let us know if you find anything.

Cheers,
Luís

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 10:38 AM Orm Finnendahl <orm.finnendahl@selma.hfmdk-frankfurt.de> wrote:
Hi,

 after some time slime-autodoc stops working on my machine. I haven't
yet found out what triggers this. Disabling/Reenablinging
slime-autodoc-mode doesn't help. It works again after restarting emacs
and lisp.

Here is the situation after it stops working:

- Calling #'slime-arglist directly works: The symbol at point is
  suggested correctly and the arglist is properly displayed.

- <C-h k SPC> displays:

  SPC runs the command slime-autodoc-space (found in
  slime-autodoc-mode-map), which is an interactive Lisp function in
  ‘slime-autodoc.el’.

  It is bound to SPC.

  (slime-autodoc-space N)

  Like ‘slime-space’ but nicer.

  [back]

- Running #'slime-autodoc-space manually results in a ^M displayed at
  point.

This is on emacs 26.1, slime 2.21, sbcl 1.4.8, Arch Linux 64 bit.

Can someone help or give me some hints how to debug this?

--
Orm