[kiiski]

I've seen a lot of people mention using rlwrap with sbcl. I'm a bit curious about how people actually do the development with that.

Do you use the repl to simply (load ...) files; never doing anything interactively with it? When I'm using emacs+slime I constantly write small loops/functions in the repl for testing, but doing that with rlwrap feels pretty painful to me. Do you have some sort of scratch-file that you write those in, which you can easily load?

At least to me the debugger feels pretty horrible to use without slime. How do you usually fix/redifine functions when debugging a problem? How about stepping through code? Making sense of the compiler notes/errors must also be pretty annoying without having them highlighted in your editor?

[Syssiphus]

You can still use Emacs+SLIME, Vim+Slimv or whatever. It's just mentioned because of the fact that sbcl does not have readline support (last time I looked).

[laarc]

It is a huge pain to use rlwrap to edit Lisp. Someone, please write a "lispwrap" program which solves this pain point once and for all.

[ohyes]

Better to use emacs/slime with Meta-x slime-connect and ssh port forwarding.