I absolutely hate waiting for computers. One of the places I found myself waiting was emacs trying as hard as it can to suck Firefox or Konqueror up into my memory when ever I want to look up a Common Lisp symbol in SLIME in the Hyperspec. I could keep a browser window open to to the Hyperspec, but cycling to the window out of the many I have, or unminimizing it with the mouse and groveling around in it also became damn annoying after a while.

So I wrote this tiny piece of code. It uses the hyperspec package and fires up w3m in an xterm with the documentation in question. The interface to this code is the macro clhs. It is a macro because it'll autoquote the symbol given to it so you don't have to do it yourself. I love it a lot because I type a lisp command, the window pops up, I can navigate, and then make the window go away all without leaving the keyboard because the window pops up with keyboard focus. I've bracketed the code with #+sbcl because this is very specific to that implementation. It also needs the hyperspec-lookup library, but that is easy to get and configure.

I love it when the license is longer than the code.

;; Copyright (c) 2010 Peter Keller (psilord@cs.wisc.edu)
;; 
;; Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
;; of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
;; in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
;; to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
;; copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
;; furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
;; 
;; The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
;; all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
;; 
;; THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
;; IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
;; FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
;; AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
;; LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
;; OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
;; THE SOFTWARE.

#+sbcl (require :hyperspec-lookup)

#+sbcl (defun clhs-impl (sym)
         (let* ((sym-name (symbol-name sym))
                (url (hyperspec:lookup sym-name)))
           (sb-ext:process-close
            (sb-ext:run-program
             "/bin/sh"
             (list "-c"
                   (concatenate 'string "COLUMNS=80 /usr/bin/xterm "
                                "-geom 80x70 -e /usr/bin/w3m " url " &"))
             :output t))))

#+sbcl (defmacro clhs (sym)
         `(clhs-impl ',sym))

You'd use it like this:

* (clhs read)

[control returns to repl and an xterm window pops up at the right web page]

I'm sure it won't be too hard to rebind SLIME's clhs lookup function to something like the above. Maybe when it isn't 2:30am, I'll make it work.

End of Line.