Hi Marco,
On 4/20/07, Marco Baringer mb@bese.it wrote:
"Bill Clementson" billclem@gmail.com writes:
Hi Rainer,
On 4/17/07, Rainer Joswig joswig@lisp.de wrote:
I'm a bit used to the behavior of MCL when it comes to Lisp buffers and listeners. Maybe SLIME developers know how to achieve a similar behavior or would like to provide something similar.
MCL allowed multiple Lisp text editor windows and listener windows. If there are multiple listeners one is the front most.
SLIME does allow you to have multiple REPL windows. When you do "M-x slime" multiple times, it will ask you whether you want to create an additional repl.
are you sure? i tried this today and multiple M-x slime will start multiple swank-servers in the lisp but you still only get one repl buffer (this looks a lot like a bug).
Yes, I'm sure. Well, at least I'm sure it does one specific thing (which may not be what you think Rainer wants nor what he actually does want ;-) ). I don't usually use multiple repl's, so I'm not sure I understand the specific use case that Rainer wants to address. As I see it, there may be 3 different types of "new" repl's that one could want to have (which, depending on your specific use case may or may not be what is required):
#1: You want to "play around" with some ideas but don't want to "muck up" your existing lisp environment and repl. In that case, you probably want to start up a new lisp instance and test things in a completely independent repl. When I do "M-x slime" multiple times (and say "n" to the "Create an additional *inferior-lisp*?" prompt), that is exactly what I get - multiple lisp instances with a separate repl for each one. I can use "C-c C-x c" to switch between them so I can do my "mucking around" in the one repl and do the "real stuff" in the other repl ("C-c C-x c" also controls which repl is "active" when you're in a lisp buffer compiling/evaluating/etc code).
#2: You want to have multiple repl's on the same lisp instance (with each repl sharing the repl history and */**/***/etc values). This is useful if you want to use one repl for a demo but want to be able to enter other commands in another repl to set up or modify an environment for the demo. There are probably other use cases for this; however, this is what I normally use #2 for. Again (as with #1), I can use "C-c C-x c" to switch between the repl's so I have control over which one is "active". Although SLIME does not provide any standard function for automatically creating multiple repl's, it is easy enough to do if you are using a lisp with threads. In your existing SLIME repl, you can just enter "(swank::create-server :port some-port)" and then in emacs do a "M-x slime-connect" and specify the host & port. If you do this a lot, you could automate it with something like the following:
(defun slime-new-repl () "Create additional REPL for the current Lisp connection." (interactive) (if (slime-current-connection) (let ((port (slime-connection-port (slime-connection)))) (slime-eval `(swank::create-server :port ,port)) (slime-connect slime-lisp-host port)) (error "Not connected")))
and just do "M-x slime-new-repl" whenever you wanted a new repl. As you can see from the above function, although you can specify any port, you can also just reuse the existing port for the separate repl, so it's easy enough to do when you're ssh'ing to a remote machine too.
#3: You want to have multiple repl's on the same lisp instance (with each repl having it's own repl history and */**/***/etc values). I thought that it was possible to do this at one time with SLIME; however, I just had a play and I don't think there is any way that you can currently do this in SLIME.
I thought Rainer was after #1 when I initially replied. If he is after #1 or #2, SLIME currently supports these types of multiple repl's. If he was looking for #3, I don't think that is currently supported. Maybe Rainer could indicate what specific use case he is trying to address with multiple repl's.
-- Bill Clementson