I’m now trying to learn Common Lisp, the claimed most powerful language that eve r existed. And if you’re to use CL, you gotta use Emacs. I searched IDE’s, but I didn’t get much luck. However there’re Emacs and Vi modes for lisp. They say: ” If you really need to use Vi, then we have this mode for you…” and they don’t even try to cover up their contempt when they tell you this. So I had to use ema cs.

To use emacs, you gotta use Slime. It’s more a religion than not. CL? OK, Emacs you use, with Slime. You don’t get much choice. Fortunately, I’m not looking for options, since I’m not good at choosing. I dived into Slime directly.

With Slime, you can look up the hypersec with three key strokes. What a convenie nce! And I enjoyed it. Then one day I decided to get rid of the iceweasel I’ve a pted from the debian source. It sucks. I use FoxyProxy for proxying my Wikipedia access, and iceweasel doesn’t seem to get along quite along with the addon. To have to give up one of them, FoxyProxy will not be the answer. I can use Firefox from the Mozilla web site. And I did.

Then the C-c C-d h strokes for the Slime mode mysteriously broke down. I got abs olutely no idea what was up — I was so new in CL and Emacs that I knew less tha n an idiot. I peeked into the Slime code and saw that it used the browse-url pac kage to display the hyperspec docs. Great, but I didn’t find the browse-url sour ce. I then googled, people talked about setqing some browse-url-generic-program and more, and went suggesting C-h p for browse-url help info. I tried and found little luck. I even fixed the problem of not being able to open up my Firefox br owser because of the firefox and the run-mozilla script tries to guess the firef ox-bin name by the call name which was accidentally x-www-browser. But with Slim e, it doesn’t work. I was almost desparate.

Then I decided to try by myself. The Slime doc mentioned the *scratch* buffer as somewhere you can evaluate EL expressions. I tried, and it did eval my expr’s. I tried M-tab, and it showed me symbols starting with browse-url. I spent some t ime snoofing and found out the fact that my Emacs’s using some moz-program to op en up the browser. Then I found out the fact that Emacs was trying to bring abou t the browser with the command “mozilla”. And there’s no such thing as “mozilla” on my laptop. I made a link pointing to firefox, and the problem was fixed.

It’s easy as that. Nothing mysterious… yet nothing you would anybody’d tell yo u. It’s convention, and people expect you to know, rather than ask for. And now I tasted the power of convention.