7.1 Emacs-side

The Emacs part of SLIME can be configured with the Emacs customize system, just use M-x customize-group slime RET. Because the customize system is self-describing, we only cover a few important or obscure configuration options here in the manual.

slime-truncate-lines

The value to use for truncate-lines in line-by-line summary buffers popped up by SLIME. This is t by default, which ensures that lines do not wrap in backtraces, apropos listings, and so on. It can however cause information to spill off the screen.

slime-multiprocessing

This should be set to t if you want to use multiprocessing (threads) in your Lisp system. It causes any necessary initialization to be performed during Lisp server startup.

slime-complete-symbol-function

The function to use for completion of Lisp symbols. Three completion styles are available. The default slime-complete-symbol* performs completion “in parallel” over the hyphen-delimited sub-words of a symbol name. ¹ Formally this means that “a-b-c” can complete to any symbol matching the regular expression “^a.*-b.*-c.*” (where “dot” matches anything but a hyphen). Examples give a more intuitive feeling:

• m-v-b completes to multiple-value-bind.
• w-open is ambiguous: it completes to either with-open-file or with-open-stream. The symbol is expanded to the longest common completion (with-open-) and the point is placed at the first point of ambiguity, which in this case is the end.
• w--stream completes to with-open-stream.

An alternative is slime-simple-complete-symbol, which completes in the usual Emacs way. Finally, there is slime-fuzzy-complete-symbol, which is quite different from both of the above and tries to find best matches to an abbreviated symbol. It also has its own keybinding, defaulting to C-c M-i. See slime-fuzzy-complete-symbol, for more information.

slime-filename-translations

This variable controls filename translation between Emacs and the Lisp system. It is useful if you run Emacs and Lisp on separate machines which don't share a common file system or if they share the filessytem but have different layouts, as is the case with SMB-based file sharing.

slime-net-coding-system

If you want to transmit Unicode characters between Emacs and the Lisp system, you should customize this variable. E.g., if you use SBCL, you can set:

          (setq slime-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
     

To actually display Unicode characters you also need appropriate fonts, otherwise the characters will be rendered as hollow boxes. If you are using Allegro CL and GNU Emacs, you can also use emacs-mule-unix as coding system. GNU Emacs has often nicer fonts for the latter encoding.

• Hooks