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A comment on Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp. Parent comment

Re:Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp by skydhash on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:45AM (#47909541)
Interactive development is because Common Lisp runntime has the concept of images and systems. Just like you start you OS and do things with it, you start the Lisp runtime and do things with it. It’s a point A to point B type of interaction like running a script. Smalltalk, SMl, a modern web browser,… has the same kind of interaction. It’s not dependent on any editor.

Also automatic idiomatic formatting of lisp code is possible in any editor as long as they have the settings for it. Not sure how Emacs is the gatekeeper on that one.

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Re:Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp by reikonomusha on Sunday April 26, 2026 @11:48AM (#47911239)
What you say is entirely true in theory. An editor can have whatever it wants. Anything is possible—but somebody needs to do the work. If your favorite code editor is Zed, chances are nobody wrote proper Lisp indentation in it or any sort of Lisp interaction mode.

Why has it stuck with Emacs and its derivatives? I don't know. It seems interest in investing time to make a good Lisp environment for a non-Emacs editor fizzles out once it gets to the difficult part of productionizing it, which is why Emacs continues to be the #1 no-cost choice.

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Re:Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp by skydhash on Sunday April 26, 2026 @12:50PM (#47911719)
Emacs has support for all kind of programming languages and other tools. It's very easy to hack somethings and the effort required to polish it enough for a 0.1 release is small. Compared that to creating a plugin for VS Code or IDEA? Not worth it especially with the disjointed interfaces (Emacs has buffers and nothing else).
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Re:Mine, an IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp by vindarel on Monday April 27, 2026 @07:55AM (#47920403)
Someone threw out a Zed LSP for Common Lisp with LLMs help: https://github.com/etyurkin/zed-cl It requires heavy compilation of the wasm toolchain so I finally didn't try it. It seems it doesn't have a lisp debugger.
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