Installation

Set up your Common Lisp environment

You can skip this section if you already have a comfortable Common Lisp environment.

Common Lisp implementation

First, you must choose a Common Lisp implementation.

Reblocks is designed and implemented to be portable and should run on the most popular Common Lisp implementations. It is currently best tested on SBCL and Clozure CL, though.

Development environment setup

There are at least two fundamentally different development approaches for using Common Lisp:

• Editor-centric development: you access all Lisp functions from within your editor.

Example: Emacs/Slime, Vim/Slimv, Lispworks IDE.

Incremental development happens mainly on the S-Expression level. This means that you edit a SEXP and send it with the help of your editor directly to your Lisp image, which evaluates it, thus affecting the current Lisp environment.

• UNIX-style development: one tool for each job. The editor is not all that important here (as long as you're comfortable with it and it supports at least a basic level of paren highlighting).

Example: Vim and your favorite terminal emulator. You start Vim in one window and your Lisp in another. Interaction happens by reloading your application's ASDF system and simple copy/paste of snippets.

We will try to be largely agnostic about the development approach in this manual, which actually means that we tend towards the second approach: Lisp calls are referred to by what you'd type in your REPL, not by Emacs shortcuts as is often the case.

For a basic comfortable SBCL setup, you can install SBCL from your system's package manager, download it from http://www.sbcl.org/, or use Roswell which provides an easy way to install and manage multiple Common Lisp implementations.

Installation

Note

The official Quicklisp distribution contains an old Weblocks version.

This documentation is about the newer Reblocks fork. It is only available on Ultralisp.org for now.

The easiest way to install Reblocks and additional libraries is to use the https://ultralisp.org distribution. It is Quicklisp compatible. To install Reblocks from Ultralisp, evaluate these commands in your REPL:

CL-USER> (ql-dist:install-dist "http://dist.ultralisp.org/"
                               :prompt nil)
CL-USER> (ql:quickload :reblocks)

If you are using Qlot to pin versions, you can add these lines to your qlfile:

dist ultralisp http://dist.ultralisp.org/
ql :all :latest
ultralisp :all :latest

Run qlot update after these changes, and the new Reblocks will be available to install.