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TeMPOraL edited this page Sep 13, 2013 · 9 revisions

This page collects information on various free applications useful to Lisp game developers. Many non-Lisp applications provide Lisp extensibility or bindings.

Text Editors and IDEs

  • GNU Emacs is a popular Emacs-like editor with excellent support for multiple dialects of Lisp via SLIME.
  • VIM (VI Improved) is a vi-like editor popular with people who don't like Emacs, which also has a SLIME-like Lisp tool called SLIMV.
  • Gedit is the official general-purpose text editor of GNOME.
  • VILE adds some features of Emacs to a vi-like editor.
  • CUSP is a Lisp Plugin for Eclipse (so more of an IDE than a Text Editor) which includes a REPL, although the last release appears to have been over 12 months ago (July 2009) and is no longer in active development (as the main developer has moved on to non-Lisp related work).
  • lispdev is a fork of CUSP which appears to be in active development.

Lisp-extensible applications

  • The GIMP image editor has Lisp-fu.
  • The SND audio editor is a sort of "audio Emacs" using Scheme. Like Emacs, SND has a high learning curve, is highly extensible, and pretty high quality.
  • Ecasound is easy to extend with Emacs Lisp. I would like to convert these to Common Lisp at some point.
  • Milkytracker, aside from being a lot of fun, produces XM music files whose musical cues can be triggered from Common Lisp via Lispbuilder-SDL.
  • CSound has both Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp interoperability, with a range of interactive Emacs tools as well.
  • Audacity for sound editing. Plug-ins can be written in Nyquist - a dedicated Lisp dialect.

Useful, but not currently Lisp-extensible

Please correct any entries I'm wrong about.

  • Ardour is a free digital audio workstation (DAW).
  • Blender is an open source 3D graphics suite.
  • InkScape is an open source vector graphics editor.
  • Pure Data for audio synthesis and processing.
  • Hexter is a free Yamaha DX-7 software emulator.
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