The most usable IDE with a lisp variant

[PatrickForkin]

Hallo again!
As a prophet once said, the questions always come in groups of three; my next, third and last for today is related to the most usable IDE for Lisp. Is there a best choice?
I am looking for an IDE that will guide me through choosing the right program structure and the right LISP functions for my tasks. Again any recomenndations based on good experiences are welcome.
Regards, PatrickForkin.

[myst]

I'd recommend Emacs with SLIME.

[gugamilare]

For Scheme, there is DrScheme and others which I`m not familiar with.

For Common Lisp, there is Emacs+SLIME (as myst already told), which is very flexible and powerful. Something more beginner-friendly would be Cusp (a plugin for Eclipse), Edi Weitz's Starter Pack (wich works with Lispworks, for Windows) or ABLE (ABLE's homepage seems out of order now, maybe it will be available soon).

Among those, the only ones I tested were Emacs+SLIME (which is the one I use) and Cusp, and I would recommend the latter for a beginner, unless you are willing to learn new and different things, in which case I recommend Emacs+SLIME.

[xconan]

Hello,

I guess Emacs together with SLIME is the best choice.

I also tried Eclipse together with the Dandelion plugin (it is actually bundled with the SBCL Environment) under Linux, but the interface towards SBCL is not really stable. Setting up the whole thing was also rather complex - I had to modify slightly and recompile the Dandelion plugin and also SBCL to make it work, since the downloaded plugin did not support the latest SBCL versions (i.e. > 1.0.27).
So far I have not yet tried Cusp.

[phil]

ABLE (ABLE's homepage seems out of order now, maybe it will be available soon).

I had a bit of an accident when I moved servers a while back and never put the site back together as I hadn't worked on the ABLE code for some time. I've not been playing with CL lately so if anyone would like to take over the project then please get in touch with me and I can drop you the most recent tarball.

Otherwise I would also recommend Emacs - there's a certain inevitability that leads one to it in the end

[nuntius]

ABLE has a new homepage. The gitweb link is currently broken, but it should be operational soon.

[Suroy]

I know this is an old thread, but theres a new interesting approach. embedding emacs into gtk. You can use emacs but with some modern conveniences. No lisp specific plugins (I think) but its a possiblity

http://pida.co.uk/