I wanted to get SLIME working so that I could efficiently code lisp, which is my next learning endeavour. This turned out to be much more difficult than I imagined. I've decided to document the steps I took to connect SLIME to a running SBCL (my lisp implementation) on Gentoo. Although outdated, the video on this page (direct link) is a good overview of SLIME.

• Emerge SBCL

  sudo emerge -av sbcl
  

• Check out the fairly-stable version of SLIME I put all the software I build from source by myself in ~/src, but you could put it anywhere.

  cd ./src
  cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@common-lisp.net:/project/slime/cvsroot checkout -r FAIRLY-STABLE slime
  

• Create a "systems" folder for SBCL to find SLIME's swank.asd file in.

  cd ./lisp
  mkdir systems
  cd ./systems
  ln -s ~/src/slime/swank.asd
  

• Add the following to ~/.sbclrc (create the file if it doesn't exist).

  (require :asdf)
  (push "/home/[user]/lisp/systems/" asdf:*central-registry*)
  

• Add the following to ~/.emacs

  (setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl" ; your Lisp system
      slime-startup-animation t) 
  (add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/slime") ; your SLIME directory
  (require 'slime)
  (slime-setup '(slime-fancy slime-asdf))
  

• Start up SBCL, and run the following:

  (asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :swank)
  (swank:create-server)
  

• Now running 'M-x slime-connect' in Emacs should start a REPL that looks something like

  ; SLIME 2011-11-03
  CL-USER> 
  

  Expect to be prompted for host name and port; accept the defaults.