Installing SLIME

 SLIME is an emacs mode for interacting with Common Lisp systems.

The SLIME developers recommend that users  download the CVS version.

Configuration

Here's a suitable .emacs excerpt to configure SLIME to work with Clozure CL, using UTF-8 as the default encoding.

(set-language-environment "utf-8")

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/src/slime/")  ;or wherever you put it

;;; Note that if you save a heap image, the character
;;; encoding specified on the command line will be preserved,
;;; and you won't have to specify the -K utf-8 any more.
(setq inferior-lisp-program "/usr/local/bin/ccl64 -K utf-8")

(require 'slime)
(setq slime-net-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
(slime-setup '(slime-fancy))

With this in place, you should be able to start up SLIME with M-x slime, and print and read Unicode characters:

CCL> (format t "~c" #\u+2021)
‡                                                                               
NIL                                                                             
CCL> (format t "~c" #\skull_and_crossbones)
☠
NIL
CCL> (defparameter language '日本語)
LANGUAGE
CCL> language
日本語