Common Lisp Interface Manager

McCLIM Lisp Listener

The Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) is a Common Lisp-based programming interface for creating user interfaces — i.e., GUIs. It is completely object-oriented and is based on the idea of stream input and output. There are also facilities for output device independence. It is descended from the GUI system Dynamic Windows of Symbolics's Lisp machines^[1]

CLIM has been designed to be portable across different Common Lisp implementations and different window systems. CLIM supports, like Dynamic Windows, so-called Presentations ^[2].

CLIM is available for Allegro CL, LispWorks, Macintosh Common Lisp and Symbolics Genera.

A free implementation of CLIM is called McCLIM. McCLIM has several extensions to CLIM and has been used for several applications like Climacs, an Emacs-like editor.

References

1. ^ "...you can check out Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM). A descendant of the Symbolics Lisp Machines GUI framework, CLIM is powerful but complex. Although many commercial Common Lisp implementations actually support it, it doesn't seem to have seen a lot of use. But in the past couple years, an open-source implementation of CLIM, McCLIM--now hosted at Common-Lisp.net --has been picking up steam lately, so we may be on the verge of a CLIM renaissance."[1] from "Conclusion: What's Next?" in Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel.
2. ^ Presentation Based User Interfaces, MIT Technical Report: AITR-794, 1984, Eugene C. IV Ciccarelli

External links

• CLIM 2.0 Specification as multiple HTML pages
  (McCLIM tarballs contain the specification's TeX sources)
• McCLIM Project Page
• Climacs Project Page