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Installing Babel on Windows

These instructions assume you have already installed the dependencies and you have downloaded Babel on your computer. Follow these additional steps to configure your Windows computer for Babel development:

  • Download the latest version of Slime. Unpack it and rename the unpacked folder to slime and move it to C:\Program Files (x86)\.
  • Add the location of CCL to your Path system environment variable. Go to the Settings and then edit the value for the variable Path (which is in the list of System variables) by appending the CCL directory. Make sure these paths are indeed correct. Below is an example of how your Path variable could look. If you have your programs somewhere else, use those directories.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Graphviz2.32\bin;C:\Program Files (x86)\ccl;C:\Program Files (x86)\gnuplot\bin
  • For configuring your Emacs, use a text editor to create a plain text file called .emacs (without extension but with a dot) in your “Application Data” folder. The location of this folder depends on your Windows version, e.g. on Windows 10 the folder might be called C:/Users/<YourName>/AppData/Roaming. To find out where your “Application Data” folder is, open the Windows command prompt (from the start menu) and type echo %APPDATA%. Add the following lines to this .emacs file and adapt the path to your Slime folder.
(custom-set-variables
 '(cua-mode t nil (cua-base))
 '(emacsw32-style-frame-title t)
 '(show-paren-mode t)
 '(column-number-mode t)
 '(indent-tabs-mode nil)
 '(make-backup-files nil))

(setq inferior-lisp-program "wx86cl64.exe")

(add-to-list 'load-path "C:/Program Files (x86)/slime")
(require 'slime)
(slime-setup '(slime-repl slime-autodoc slime-fancy-inspector))

;;; this automatically starts the lisp
(command-execute 'slime)

  • When you start Emacs, it should now automatically start a Lisp session.

  • Download and install Quicklisp. First, download the quicklisp.lisp file from the website. Start Emacs and enter the following commands in the REPL, line per line. Press enter after each line to evaluate. The last line will create a file called ccl-init.lisp in your home directory.

(load "/path/to/quicklisp.lisp") 
(quicklisp-quickstart:install)
(ql:add-to-init-file)
  • Open the file ccl-init.lisp in your home directory, most likely C:/Users/<YourName>/ccl-init.lisp, and add the following line to the end of this text file:
(load "C:/Users/<YourName>/Babel/init-babel")
  • The next time you start your Lisp, Babel will be automatically initialised. You can test your installation by opening the file Babel/test-babel-installation.lisp in Emacs. Read the comments in this file and evaluate the expressions one by one.