Nothing is more important than clear instructions on getting a useful environment up and running! I'm reading Practical Common Lisp and wanted clisp, emacs, and slime for my lisp environment in order to follow along in the book. I was unable to find good instructions on this for Mac OS X with an x86 chip so I thought I'd share what I learned.
First, I had to install clisp from fink and the x86 version of clisp is only available in the unstable tree. You can find the instructions for this on the fink FAQ. After that I simply installed the clisp package like any other fink package. I ran the following to ensure lisp was working
$ /sw/bin/clisp
Next, I installed emacs (aquamacs) from here
I then installed slime from here. After untaring the file I had a folder named 'slime-x.x.x' I renamed this to plain 'slime' and moved it to ~/.emacs.d/ which you may need to create first.
I had to tell emacs to load slime and where to find it. I did this by creating ~/.emacs with the following contents.
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/sw/bin/clisp")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/slime")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup)
That's it. To make sure it worked I opened emacs and started slime (M-x slime)
