So i wanna learn Common Lisp

I'm very new to Emacs and to CL too,so for this reason i'm here to ask you where i could find a newbie friendly guide to make my Emacs an complete ide for Common Lisp with SBCL on board. Thanks.

Me too!

If you like to learn by watching videos, I recommend Gavin Freeborn's YouTube channel. For example, here is a video on setting up the [Sly REPL for Common Lisp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DLdQ6yb7h8 ), and here is a video on setting up a new project with [QuickLisp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqBbGFMPcDI ). Also, read through these resources: - [The Tutorialspoint.com Lisp Tutorial](https://www.tutorialspoint.com/lisp/index.htm ) - [The Lisp-Lang.org tutorial](https://lisp-lang.org/learn/ ) - [The Common Lisp Hyperspec](http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Front/index.htm ) - [The Art of the Metaobject Protocol](https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2607/The-Art-of-the-Metaobject-Protocol ) for understanding object oriented programming with CLOS.

With emacs your two choices are either [SLIME](https://github.com/slime/slime) or [SLY](https://github.com/joaotavora/sly). Slime is a good place to start - it's rock solid. Once you get moving you can make a judgement call on whether or not SLY has features you'd like over what SLIME has available. Paredit is also essential. [Quick start instructions for SLIME can be found here.](https://github.com/slime/slime#quick-setup-instructions) That is all there is to do. SLIME does everything. As far as learning the language goes, [the free book Practical Common Lisp](https://gigamonkeys.com/book/) is highly recommended.[The Common Lisp Cookbook](https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/) is also a good resource for people learning common lisp. [The cookbook has some more details on using emacs as a lisp IDE](https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/emacs-ide.html) \- but really, all you need is SLIME or SLY and paredit. The cookbook will guide you to getting stuff like company completion, etc. Don't forget to follow [https://www.reddit.com/r/common\_lisp](https://www.reddit.com/r/common_lisp) !

Get The Land of Lisp. One of the best books on programming, not just CL: http://landoflisp.com/

I like SLY, haven't really tried SLIME to be honest, went for SLY directly. Works pretty much out of the books, and very well in my opinion, so I can recommend at least trying SLY. This is the only "setup" I have added to the defaults: (setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/bin/sbcl") (defkeys sly-prefix-map "M-h" sly-documentation-lookup) Don't care about "defkeys", just my personal macro to set up keyboard shortcuts.

I also highly recommend Practical Common Lisp.

The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen was an easy read. You can find pdf chips online with a simple Google search

Seems like you don't know any lisp. Common lisp, is one variant of lisp. If you have time, and you want to gain like 10 iq points, I would recommend working through [Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Computer_Programs). One of the best books ever written. It uses Scheme, another variant of lisp.

If you are new to Lisp in general then one approach is to focus on Emacs Lisp initially. It is not exactly CL but there are a lot more similarities than differences. Emacs is an excellent learning environment for Emacs Lisp, it's the closest thing to a Lisp Machine we have these days. Once you are comfortable with elisp switching over to CL will be a smaller jump. A big part of it is the tooling and the ecosystem. The elisp knowledge you pick up on the way will be invaluable if you continue using Emacs.

If you start with a bare Emacs setup and try to configure the editor thoroughly, you will learn some Emacs Lisp on the way. I am not sure if Emacs is the "best editor" for Common Lisp, but is sure the best to give you a nice introduction into the Lisp family of languages. The documentation on [gnu.org](https://gnu.org) about ELisp is a great start. And when you will feel comfortable you will switch your focus to Common Lisp... I believe that would be a great learning path.

In addition to the great resources mentioned, see this guide: https://github.com/susam/emacs4cl I like it with one difference: keep the Emacs menu bar and use it to explore the available commands. Once you are setup, I have a guide to create a full-featured CL project with my project generator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFc513MJjos If it is too much, just stay with the Cookbook and go step by step. See also Portacle: https://portacle.github.io/ It is a portable Emacs that is ready-to-use for CL: it comes with Slime, some Emacs packages, Quicklisp and git.

if you have java/c/c++/algol... background you should definitely read PCL. when i have read it first i had at least 15years of experience with c++ at its highest level (template metaprogramming/boost/etc) in a matter of weeks PCL and co made me realize i was living under a rock

This is an extremely poor book for simply learning a lisp.

Don't wanna over load you but you may wanna try portacle. It's an easy install preconfigured emacs setup. Comes with sbcl (a common lisp compiler and implementation) and quicklisp (common lisp package manager) out of the box.

Portacle is a configured emacs for common lisp development. There's also a quite new emacs like editor written in CL called lem