About ~~~~~ This plug-in embeds Armed Bear Common Lisp into IntelliJ IDEA and allows extending IDEA using Common Lisp, in particular interactively from SLIME. Video presentation of how this plugin works may be found here: http://avodonosov.blogspot.com/2009/08/extending-intellij-idea-using-common.html. Created by Anton Vodonosov, avodonosov()yandex.ru. I would be glad to hear any feedback. Plug-in usage ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ After you unpacked abcl-idea.zip into your IDEA "plugins" directory and restarted IDEA, you will have new command "ABCL Start" in the Tools menu. This command starts ABCL compiler, attaches its input/output streams to "ABCL Console" tool window, and runs lisp/start.lisp file. Default content of start.lisp is loading yanking.lisp, and then starting SLIME. yanking.lisp is a demonstration of how to extend IDEA in Common Lisp. It implements yank and yank-pop commands similar to Emacs. As for starting SLIME, you certainly need to edit start.lisp to specify correct path to your slime/swank-loader.lisp file (or just comment out SLIME startup if you don't need it). The plug-in is bundled with ABCL port of Rich Hickey's jfli, which makes java interaction quite simple. See jfli manual here: http://jfli.sourceforge.net/, and also yanking.lisp and examples in jfli-abcl folder. During the plug-in startup variable ABCLIDEA:*LISP-DIR* is initialized to a string representing full path to the "lisp" directory. You may load lisp files from that directory like this: (load (concatenate 'string abclidea:*lisp-dir* "myfile.lisp")) Check also fun.lisp, which contains Hello World -like examples of manipulating IDEA from SLIME. Note for developers who wish to extend the ABCL plug-in ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Explains how the plug-in knows where to locate .lisp files. Pre-bundled .lisp files (like start.lisp, yanking.lisp) are located in the src/abclidea/lisp directory of the plug-in source tree. There are two cases: - During the plug-in development, when you start Run/Debug configuration from IDEA. It is convenient to have IDEA copying the .lisp files to plug-in sandbox together with the plug-in, so that they are immediately available for testing. For this purpose resource pattern "*.lisp" is added to compiler settings in the IDEA project. In result .lisp files are placed to classes/abclidea/lisp directory of the plug-in. - When the plug-in is deployed using "Prepare Plug-in Module for Deployment" command from the Build menu, plug-in classes are packaged into lib/abcl-idea.jar file. It is inconvenient to have lisp files in .jar, because user is expected to edit them. Therefore you must extract lisp directory from the lib/abcl-idea.jar!/abclidea and place it beside the "lib" directory of the plug-in distribution. I.e. in the IDEA "plugins" folder you will have abcl-idea/ lib/ abcl-idea.jar abcl.jar asm-1.5.3.jar lisp/ start.lisp yanking.lisp ... These two situations are distinguished by checking whether plug-in classes are in .jar or not. See AbclIdea.getStartLispFile method.