7.1.1 Setting up the lisp image

When you want to load swank without going through the normal, Emacs based, process just load the swank-loader.lisp file. Just execute

(load "/path/to/swank-loader.lisp")
(swank-loader:init)

inside a running lisp image². Now all we need to do is startup our swank server. The first example assumes we’re using the default settings.

(swank:create-server)

Since we’re going to be tunneling our connection via ssh³ and we’ll only have one port open we want to tell swank to not use an extra connection for output (this is actually the default in current SLIME):

(setf swank:*use-dedicated-output-stream* nil)

If you need to do anything particular (like be able to reconnect to swank after you’re done), look into swank:create-server’s other arguments. Some of these arguments are

:PORT

Port number for the server to listen on (default: 4005).

:STYLE

See See Communication style.

:DONT-CLOSE

Boolean indicating if the server will continue to accept connections after the first one (default: NIL). For “long-running” lisp processes to which you want to be able to connect from time to time, specify :dont-close t

:CODING-SYSTEM

String designating the encoding to be used to communicate between the Emacs and Lisp.

So the more complete example will be

(swank:create-server :port 4005  :dont-close t :coding-system "utf-8-unix")

On the emacs side you will use something like

(setq slime-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
(slime-connect "localhost" 4005))

to connect to this lisp image from the same machine.