If you’ve been around Emacs long enough to learn some Elisp, you probably know about IELM, the Inferior Emacs Lisp Mode. It provides an Elisp REPL that is often easier to use than evaluating separate Elisp statements. It’s one of those things that I don’t use all that often but can be very handy when you want to make extended Elisp calculations.
Nicolas Martyanoff also likes IELM but considers it to be too rudimentary so he set out to improve things. There were three things that he wanted to improve:
- He wanted to enable Eldoc in the IELM buffer.
- He wanted to enable Paredit.
- He wanted to enable persistent command history.
The first two were simple, merely a matter of adding a function call to the two appropriate hooks. There was a small wrinkle with the second but it was easily resolved. The third was a little harder and required writing some code and advising the IELM input function. Even so, the total amount of code is minimal and easily added to your init.el.
He also adds a couple of useful keybindings. Take a look at Martyanoff’s post for the details. If you use IELM and would like the usual Lisp amenities, Martyanoff’s changes are a good place to start.