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by Kessler83 1677 days ago
Well, to each their own. I never have to restart Emacs. The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something. I'm sure I could avoid restarting SLIME, too---I just never bothered to learn if there is a way.

BTW, all software that changes will have a bug from time to time, but Emacs and things related to Common Lisp are like at the very bottom of the trouble-frequency charts. I can't think of any software that I use regularly that gives me fewer problems. For the record I never encountered a bug in either (which doesn't mean they don't exist).

2 comments

The problem with Emacs' configuration file is that it's processed in an additive way. Removing options and reloading the config does absolutely nothing. So in certain situations a restart is just inevitable.

But aside from that Emacs, like most programs, has a UX philosophy that I can't stand. And while Emacs lets me change that I don't want to manually redefine things for every single filetype and mode I'm using. Vim just does it right unless I make the mistake of writing JS in HTML files.

Vim is a fantastic editor---no argument there!

But you can always revert a configuration choice you made without restarting Emacs. Either use the built in configuration interface, or evaluate a form with the change. For example, if you set something to t you can reset it to nil and just C-x-e that form.

>The only time I restart SLIME is when I do something I shouldn't, like redefine a struct or something.

That's not something you shouldn't do and you also shouldn't need to restart Slime. Just break using `C-c C-c` and do a 'retry'.