I'm not a fan of Roswell or Portacle, personally, because I'm used to taking control of my setup. I try to stick with well-maintained distribution systems (e.g.

I'm not a fan of Roswell or Portacle, personally, because I'm used to taking control of my setup. I try to stick with well-maintained distribution systems (e.g. Debian's .deb or the source itself if need be) otherwise upgrades tend to be complex, not well documented, and supported by few people. Additionally, as one new to Common Lisp, it is difficult to understand the abstraction layer at which Roswell & Portacle operate with respect to abstraction layers implicit to Common Lisp. I better understood these layers by installing SBCL myself and playing with Quicklisp (a package manager) and ASDF (a package definition library). I wrote about this a year ago [0]. It was confusing at first. But it became clearer after exploring and writing that post. Ultimately I don't find it very different than writing a Python library with setuptools. re: SLIME; I never ended up remembering the keyboard shortcuts as a CL hobbyist so I turned it off after a few uses and stuck with vanilla Lisp-mode. Parenthesis completion and auto-ident are the only two tools I expect of my text editor (vs. in a GUI, buttons take the place of keyboard shortcuts you must remember). I use Emacs at work and home but I hardly remember any extension shortcuts (as much as I want to benefit from projectile and magit). It even took me a few years before I felt comfortable using package-install vs. just `git clone`-ing new modes and adding their paths to my .emacs. For all these reasons, Portacle as a distribution isn't really my style. Roswell didn't solve anything for me either once I got familiar with ASDF and Quicklisp. Complacency on tool UX doesn't help a community. Roswell & Portacle may be a forward iteration on UX. But I also want to share the fundamentals (or at least N-1 layer down) and get other hobbyists comfortable there too. [0] http://notes.eatonphil.com/starting-a-minimal-common-lisp-project.html http://notes.eatonphil.com/starting-a-minimal-common-lisp-pr...