Pictures in a SLIME REPL
While working on some web analytics software a few weeks ago, I wrote a dirty hack to enable pictures in SLIME REPLs. The implementation is ugly, but I think the concept is neat:
You can grab the patch against CVS SLIME here.
Yanking pictures back into the REPL works fine too, so you can do something like (defparameter *my-chart* [picture-object]).
Sample usage:
(defparameter *flickr-url* "http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=~A&s=int")
(defun flickr-pic (search)
(let ((html (drakma:http-request (format nil *flickr-url* search))))
(cl-ppcre:register-groups-bind (url)
("photo_container.+img src=\"([^\"]+)\"" html)
(swank:make-picture :url url :type 'jpeg))))
(flickr-pic "linux")
Update (22/06): To clarify in response to the reddit thread, this is a dirty proof-of-concept that resulted from an hour of hacking, and obviously shouldn’t be merged into mainline SLIME as it stands. See the slime-devel thread for the discussion surrounding it. With that said, it should be fairly straightforward to rework it as a saner contrib module.