Common Lisp standard (and its implementations) really needs an uplift to shine. There are so many shortcomings and missing features in it that listing them here would take a lot of space. Instead, I will point to some proposals like Common Lisp 3[1] and Compact Lisp[2]. Meanwhile proper typing should be introduced out of the box, like in Coalton[3], for example. Also, pattern matching should be the part of the language, not some external library [4]. Even something basic but foundational is not yet standardized - Unicode support!
Recently added in Lem: tree-sitter for JSON, YAML, Nix, Markdown, WAT; new language modes: Clojure, Perl, Kotlin, Zig (with LSP); git-gutter mode.
Lem has a (quite simple still) Git/hg/fossil interactive mode (interactive rebase is there but no reword for instance) and org-mode support is coming (https://github.com/mahmoodsh36/organ-mode).
Lem now is ncurses + webview (+ the non-longer maintained SDL2 backend) and it has daily multi-platform binaries. Try it out!
I tried the latest nightly release AppImage on Fedora 43 and got a nice undefined symbol error:
/usr/lib64/gio/modules/libdconfsettings.so: undefined symbol: g_assertion_message_cmpint
Failed to load module: /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libdconfsettings.so
/usr/lib64/gvfs/libgvfscommon.so: undefined symbol: g_task_set_static_name
Failed to load module: /usr/lib64/gio/modules/libgvfsdbus.so
So I tried out the container version with podman and that worked. I am familiar with Emacs, so some things were natural to me. I like Lem quite a bit. But to really drive with it, I need:
- Solid LSP support
- Project scoped buffer switching/searching
- Great vim keybinding support (this seems to have improved since last I tried lem years ago)
- Tree-sitter support for the languages I care about.
According to the website, LSP support is still a WIP. I didn't want to go through the hassle of testing it out in the docker container. From what I can tell, there is no project scoping for buffers, but I might be wrong.
All in all, a big improvement from a few years ago when I last tried it!
[1] https://github.com/blakemcbride/common-lisp-3
[2] https://github.com/lassik/compact-lisp
[3] https://coalton-lang.github.io/
[4] https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/pattern_matching....
Lem has a (quite simple still) Git/hg/fossil interactive mode (interactive rebase is there but no reword for instance) and org-mode support is coming (https://github.com/mahmoodsh36/organ-mode).
Lem now is ncurses + webview (+ the non-longer maintained SDL2 backend) and it has daily multi-platform binaries. Try it out!
https://lem-project.github.io/
All in all, a big improvement from a few years ago when I last tried it!
Glad we settled that.