I like the idea of sly: like slime, but cooler. Less conservative with changes, less concerned about backwards-compatibility, more features, cleaner implementation, etc. But I don’t know that much about it in detail, and I’ve never tried it - until now.

I’m going to use sly exclusively for the month of September. As I bump into differences from slime, I’m taking notes and will share them here. I hope to give people an idea about what it’s like to switch and help them decide if it’s worthwhile for them, and figure out if I’ll be switching back on October 1.

So here are a few quick notes from getting started:

Pretty easy to install, but not as easy as quicklisp-slime-helper - I can make a sly-helper in the future

Would not start initially because I had a reference to the swank package in my ~/.swank.lisp file. Referencing swank in a swank init file seems reasonable so it was a little annoying to have to add some #+swank/#+sly conditionalization.

package in my ~/.swank.lisp file. Referencing swank in a swank init file seems reasonable so it was a little annoying to have to add some #+swank/#+sly conditionalization. I use slime-selector a lot, and it’s moved into a keymap in sly - I like that it now uses a standard Emacs UI instead of a custom UI …but it’s missing the “l” binding, which I use a hundred times a day, so I wrote a little bit of elisp to add it back docstring of sly-selector-map helps explain what to do Window management in sly-selector confuses me - expect REPL to replace current window, but it seems to go somewhere else every time

comma commands are different! I use ,chTAB and ,cdRET a hundred times a day, and now they are ,set package (which has nice completion) and ,set directory

and a hundred times a day, and now they are (which has nice completion) and Much more verbose repl output for integers at least: (+ 1 1) => 2 (2 bits, #x2, #o2, #b10)

M-RET in REPL history does what I expect

Not 100% sure how to get started with stickers, but C-c C-s ? has good starting points

Should read manual…

Stay tuned for more!