[slime-devel] editing files on local swank and remote swank

[Nathan Bird]

Helmut Eller wrote:
> * Rüdiger Sonderfeld [2006-07-26 19:27+0200] writes:
> 
>> How can I configure slime so that I can run local as well as on a
>> remote machine and edit local and remote files?
> 
> This isn't well supported.

It works fairly well for my use case of it at least. I know there are at
least a few others that successfully use this functionality as well.

> 
> It's important to understand that SLIME doesn't copy files around.
> All it does is to rewrite filenames so that the Lisp system (or tramp)
> can find the file.  This usually means that the file must be readable
> by the CL process (possibly via NFS or Samba or something like that).
> 
>  [...]
> Instead of fiddling around with tramp and remote editing, I'd
> recommend to always run Emacs and Lisp on the same machine.

Most of my lisp experience has actually been developing on separate
machines, operating over tramp or a a mounted fileshare from the server.

I've encountered the "Not a tramp file name: ..."  error on a few
occasions, generally when slime tries to use the wrong set of filename
translation functions.

slime-filename-translations holds a list of translation sets each of
which is keyed by a regular expression that is matched against the
current result of #'CL:machine-instance (via calling the elisp function
slime-machine-instance). I have had a few problems as a result of this
when editing local lisp files in lisp-mode without being connected to a
running swank. Perhaps follow Helmut's advice about disabling it?

By default there is always a translator set '("" identity identity) I.E.
for any hostname that hasn't matched something earlier in the list, use
the identity function to translate to and from lisp. This should be the
one that is used for work on localhost. Check that you didn't remove
this while setting up for work on the remote host.

You can find out what is actually being used by evaling in emacs:
(slime-find-filename-translators (slime-machine-instance))

If you want to poke around with it the two key functions that slime uses
to do the translation are slime-to-lisp-filename and
slime-from-lisp-filename. They are currently around line 1300 in latest
cvs slime.el.

For reference, I'm currently using XEmacs on windows connecting to
either Allegro locally, or SBCL on a remote debian server (both through
a samba fileshare and tramp over ssh).

Hope this helps a bit,
Nathan Bird