An error message is being displayed in Emacs's echo area (minibuffer) when the following text is entered into an empty file's buffer while running SLIME: (quote ( That is, the error message is displayed after the second left/open parenthesis is typed, before any additional keys such as [Return] or [Space] are pressed. 1) Using CLisp with SLIME, the message is: Arglist Error: "The object to be destructured should be a list with at least 1 elements, not NIL." 2) Using SBCL with SLIME, the message is: Arglist Error: "error while parsing arguments to DESTRUCTURING-BIND: .." Major mode: Lisp Minor mode: ElDoc [COMMON-LISP-USER sbcl] (or clisp) Note that editing with balanced parentheses does not eliminate this problem. Enter balanced parentheses (for example, using paredit) text in the following order, where | indicates where the cursor is: Step 1 - Enter parens: (|) Step 2 - Enter "quote ()" inside the parens: (quote (|)) Step 3 - Enter a "+" character inside the inner parentheses: (quote (+|)) After "+" is typed, the error message above is displayed in the echo area. Emacs was started with the following command: $ /usr/bin/emacs -nw -Q --load ~/.emacs.d/lisp/minimal-slime-init.el empty.lisp where the file 'empty.lisp' does not already exist, and the content of 'minimal-slime-init.el' is: ;--- snip --- ;;; M-: (info "(slime)Autoloading") (setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/clisp") (setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl") (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/slime") (require 'slime-autoloads) (eval-after-load "slime" (slime-setup '(slime-repl slime-autodoc))) (sleep-for 2) (slime) ;--- snip --- If '(slime-repl slime-autodoc) is replaced with '(slime-fancy) in the call to `slime-setup', the same error message is displayed. The following software was used: 1) CLisp 2.47 2) SBCL 1.0.30 3) GNU Emacs 23.1 4) SLIME from CVS, updated on 3 Dec 09 slime.el, revision 1.1254 slime-autoloads.el, revision 1.6 contrib/slime-autodoc.el, revision 1.24 contrib/slime-fancy.el, revision 1.9 contrib/slime-repl.el, revision 1.33 ---