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Ready Lisp is a binding together of several popular Common Lisp
packages especially for Mac OS X, including: Aquamacs, SBCL and SLIME.  Once
downloaded, you’ll have a single application bundle which you can
double-click — and find yourself in a fully configured Common Lisp
REPL.

It’s ideal for OS X users who want to try out the beauty of Common Lisp with a
minimum of hassle. It could also be used by teachers to give their Mac students
a free, complete Common Lisp environment to take home with them.

Requirements

This version of Ready Lisp requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

Download

Ready Lisp is distributed as a disk image that’s approximately 87 megabytes in size:

“ftp://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/lisp/ReadyLisp-1.0.12-10.5.1-2.dmg ":ftp://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/lisp/ReadyLisp-1.0.12-10.5.1-2.dmg

Getting started

Just download the disk image, copy the application bundle that’s inside to your “Applications” folder, and double-click
on Ready Lisp.app. You should find yourself in a Common Lisp REPL within moments.

Things to be aware of

Using asdf-install

If you use asdf-install and choose a “system-wide” installation, the
installed package will end up inside your Application bundle. This works
fine only if you don’t move your application
bundle to another directory. In that case, all the symbolic links which will be broken.
Because of this, I recommend installing any new packages into your home directory instead.

Features

Runs on Emacs

Ready Lisp uses Aquamacs as the base platform for providing a rich Common Lisp editing experience.

The latest free software

Bundles the latest versions of SBCL and SLIME.

Universal binary

The application bundle is a fully universal binary, and runs on PowerPC, 32-bit and 64-bit Intel processors.

Note: There is no port of SBCL to 64-bit PowerPC. On G5 systems, it will run SBCL at 32-bit.

Single-threaded only

On Intel processors, experimental multi-threading support has not been enabled (the sb-thread package). This is because threading is not supported on Mac OS X yet.

Complete documentation

Info documentation for the Common Lisp pieces is now bundled in, including:

• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• SBCL manual
• SLIME manual
• ASDF documentation

Just type
C-h i and look for them in your documentation index. Also, when editing Common Lisp files, you can type C-h f to instantly access the HyperSpec index. In Emacs Lisp files, C-h f will
get you help on Emacs Lisp functions.

There is also HTML and PDF versions of all documentation in:

• Ready Lisp.app/Contents/Resources/html
• Ready Lisp.app/Contents/Resources/doc

Use the Source!

The full source code for SBCL is integrated into your environment, meaning that if you type M-. (go to definition)
and choose a function like mapcar, you’ll be able to instantly read the source code for SBCL’s implementation of
mapcar.

Some libraries included

Several popular Common Lisp libraries come pre-bundled in the core image:

• CL-FAD
• LOCAL-TIME
• SERIES
• CL-PPCRE

I find these libraries very handy, but mainly I’m including them because the
upcoming release of my CL-Ledger accounting tool depends on them, so it will
work for Ready Lisp users out-of-the-box. See the “doc” subdirectory above
for documentation on how to use these libraries.

Verify your download

There is a GnuPG signature for the Ready Lisp disk image in the same directory you
downloaded it from; just append
“.asc” to the same filename to download it.  To install my public key
on your keyring (assuming you have GnuPG installed), use this command:

$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv 0x824715A0

Once installed, you can verify the download using the following
command:

$ gpg --verify ReadyLisp-VERSION.dmg.asc