I’ve been using a fork of slimv for several years, but since I don’t code that much in Lisp I often use the default SBCL REPL in a split. I don’t miss too much of slimv capabilities as I handle documentation at point and completion using custom VimL scripts. However, I don’t have access to more involved tools like the debugger and error backtrace, object inspector, callee/caller navigation and many other capabilities that are readily available through slimv or vlime.
If you are looking for light yet powerful and ready to go REPLs for your Vim, here are two options:
Both provide readline capabilities, as well as syntax highlighting if you like that.
I would say icl is more in the spirit of modern REPL (like arf for R) and it also offers a notebook interface, which I didn’t really explore, with a focus on tabular data views. An interesting aspect of icl lies in its Flame Graph Profiling for SBCL. It’s been a while since I last used it and I juts noticed that it is now vide coded. As a result, maybe, it now features
AI integration - Use ,explain to get AI-powered explanations of code, errors, and results
One other curious thing is that it now ships with some bindings to Lisp-Stat (which apparently still doesn’t care about Luke Tierney original work, but that’s not the point).
On the contrary, sbcli has a more focused objective: helping the user along the various steps of developing a program in Lisp. This includes printing documentation for symbols, entering inspection mode for a symbol, and managing an interactive debugger with available restarts; it also allows to print the return type of any expression or to dump the disassembly of a symbol.
♪ Brain Machine • Heaven 8