[KC8ZKF]

A little off topic, but I notice a lot of people new to Emacs and Lisp banging there heads trying to get Slime set up and running, when Emacs has excellent Lisp support right out of the box. Slime is excellent, but complicated (even by Emacs standards). I wouldn't recommend a user installing it until a specific need arises. I can't imagine trying to learn Lisp, Emacs, and set up Slime all at once.

[jpr]

Setting up SBCL+Emacs+SLIME is really easy if you use Ubuntu or some other distro that contains packages for them. All you need to do in current Ubuntu is

    $ sudo apt-get install sbcl emacs slime && echo "(require 'slime)" >> ~/.emacs

and then start emacs and press Alt+x, write `slime´ and press enter (M-x slime for the initiated).

Now using all the available features of that combination will take a lot of time, but starting isn't really hard.

[xyzzyz]

I am not sure how it works in Ubuntu, but you might need also to set the `inferior-lisp-program' variable to 'sbcl' in emacs.