Added: example .sbclrc file

[vindarel]

Here is an example ~/.sbclrc file that you can use.

https://github.com/vindarel/common-lisp-course-in-videos/blob/master/.sbclrc

You don't strictly speaking need one to use SBCL, you can start without it.

It includes the snippet that we saw to disable the interactive debugger, which can be useful when trying things out in the terminal.

[stephensmith9]

The format statement on line 79 of the example .sbclrc produces this error:

(SB-FORMAT::FORMAT-ERROR-AT* "*** reminder: we now disable the interactive debugger. Remove this setting from ~/.sbclrc when using Slime or another IDE. *****" 81 "No matching closing slash" NIL)

I simply removed the ~/ and it goes away. I believe the ~/ is a format directive? How can we escape a forward slash in a format string? I tried googling, and surprisingly found nothing to help me. Using a preceding \ doesn't seem to work as I would have expected?

Not a big deal, but I'm really curious if format can handle printing a literal ~/ in its output?

[vindarel]

aaargh the fail. Thanks for the report.

Only ~ introduces a format directive. ~/ introduces a custom name for a format directive, it should be between / /. Example: https://github.com/vindarel/format-colors (I first read this on Edi Weitz' CL Recipes)

Yes, with ~~.

https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/strings.html#structure-of-format

Print a tilde with ~~, or 10 with ~10~.

[stephensmith9]

Thanks Vincent!

I changed the code to this (but I like your solution better):

(uiop:format! t "*** REMINDER ***: we now disable the interactive debugger. Remove this setting from ")
(let ((pathname (uiop:parse-unix-namestring "~\/.sbclrc")))
     (princ pathname))			    
(uiop:format! t " when using Slime or another IDE.~%")
(setf *debugger-hook* #'print-condition-hook)

So for completeness, what you are suggesting would look like this:

(uiop:format! t "*** REMINDER ***: we now disable the interactive debugger. Remove this setting from ~~/.sbclrc when using Slime or another IDE.~%")

[stephensmith9]

Another suggestion, while we're on the topic of the .sbclrc file, I changed the hard-coded reference to the user folder in the quicklisp section to use (user-homedir-pathname) instead, as per this cl-cookbook page:

#-quicklisp
(let ((quicklisp-init (merge-pathnames "quicklisp/setup.lisp"
                                       (user-homedir-pathname))))
  (when (probe-file quicklisp-init)
    (load quicklisp-init)))

but not sure how portable this is? Works on my MacOS setup. Haven't tested on Windows.

[vindarel]

spot-on again. I wonder why Quicklisp hardcodes the user name.

It should be portable on implementations (it's in a SBCL file anyways), and it's better than "/home/user/" for Windows.