Hi, I thought about alternatives and rejected them. Probably this patch is just fine as is and it should not raise an error when Emacs uses UTF-8 or anything and clisp was only built with 8bit strings --without-unicode. 2006-01-14 Joerg Hoehle <hoehle@users.sourceforge.net> * swank-clisp (find-encoding): work in a 8bit clisp w/o #-UNICODE. --- swank-clisp.lisp.orig 2005-11-12 00:43:43.000000000 +0100 +++ swank-clisp.lisp 2006-01-14 13:17:08.000000000 +0100 @@ -122,7 +122,9 @@ (:iso-latin-1-unix "iso-8859-1") (:utf-8-unix "utf-8") (:euc-jp-unix "euc-jp")))) - (ext:make-encoding :charset charset :line-terminator :unix))) + (ext:make-encoding :charset (if (member :unicode *features*) + charset :default) + :line-terminator :unix))) (defimplementation accept-connection (socket &key (external-format :iso-latin-1-unix) The idea in the present patch is that (untested) the same set of slime.fas files might possibly work in both builds of clisp: with and without unicode. But you'd need to compile from the 8bit version. Regards, Jorg Hohle.