A Guided Tour of CLIM, Common Lisp Interface Manager

The Common Lisp Interface Manager (clim) provides a layered set of facilities for building user interfaces. These facilities include a portable layers for basic windowing, input, output services, and mechanisms for constructing window types and user interface components; stream-oriented input and output facilities extended with presentations and context sensitive input; and a gadget-oriented toolkit similar to those found in the X world extended with support for look and feel adaptiveness. In this article, we present an overview of clim’s broad range of functionality and present a series of examples that illustrates clim’s power. The article originally appeared in Lisp Pointers in 1991 and was updated in 2006 by Clemens Fruhwirth. All examples in this article have been run with McCLIM[McC], a free clim implementation, as of January 2006. Published in Lisp Pointers 1991 Similar to the work pioneered in the Genera UI system The CLIM 2 specification changed significant parts of clim rendering legacy code unusable. Clemens Fruhwirth has rewritten all examples and the corresponding text sections for the clim 2 specification. In addition, he has restructured the whole article, adding sections to provide additional insights into clim concepts. Introduction Common Lisp is a language standard that has provided a broad range of functionality, and that has, to a large degree, successfully enabled the writing of truly portable Lisp programs. The emergence of clos and the cleanup efforts of ANSI X3J13 have further enhanced the utility and portability of Common Lisp. However, one major stumbling block remains in the path of those endeavoring to write large portable applications. The Common Lisp community has not yet provided a standard interface for implementing user interfaces beyond the most basic operations based on stream reading and printing. The Common Lisp Interface Manager addresses this problem by specifying an interface to a broad range of services necessary or useful for developing graphical user interfaces. These services include low level facilities like geometry, graphics, eventoriented input, and windowing; intermediate level facilities like support for Common Lisp stream operations, output recording, and advanced output formatting; and high level facilities like context sensitive input, an adaptive toolkit, and an application building framework. Notice that this sentence was written in 1991; it is still true 15 years later.