Extending IntelliJ IDEA using Common Lisp

If you have nothing to do, you can embed ABCL into IntelliJ IDEA and extend and control IDEA interactively from SLIME.

I created a little plugin that starts ABCL inside of IDEA:

Note: both videos for better resolution are opened in new window at their Vimeo URLs

How it works: "ABCL Start" command creates ABCL compiler and attaches it's REPL to a special "ABCL Console" tool window. Also it executes start.lisp file, which is supposed to be edited by user. User may do whatever he needs: start SLIME server or load other lisp files.

SLIME fuzzy-completion works for Java classes/methods because I use jfli (I found an ABCL port by Andras Simon). I wish fuzzy-completion work faster with ABCL (the latency may be up to half a second). But I believe ABCL will be improved in this area in the near future.

Hello Word -like examples in the video above are contained in the fun.lisp file from the plugin distribution.

Another example I prepared is implementation of Emacs-like "yanking" in IDEA (Ctrl-Y pastes an item from clipboard, and Alt-Y replaces just inserted item by next clipboard item). The code is contained in the yanking.lisp. Here it is in action:

To summarize, it is possible, and with some practice quite convenient, to use ABCL for IDEA extension.

If you have in mind some useful extension that may be implemented in Lisp, you can use my code as a boilerplate.

The sources: http://github.com/avodonosov/abcl-idea/
Binary distro: http://github.com/avodonosov/abcl-idea/downloads

Some details are provided in the README file.