Earlier this week I wrote about Using Quicklisp and mentioned another Xach project, Quickproject (the link takes you to Github, but the best way to get it is with Quicklisp). What quickproject does is to initialize a project.asd, package.lisp, project.lisp, and README.txt files for a project. The idea, as explained in Beane’s post on building small Lisp projects, is to bootstrap a project by setting up initial versions of the files you’ll need for an ASDF loadable project.
I expected that it would be really useful to working on medium sized projects such as libraries. I’m sure it will be but today I wanted to experiment with a small, single .lisp file project. I decided to try out Quickproject to see how it would work for a really small project. It was a revelation as to how much easier it made things. I started with
(quickproject:make-project "~/lisp/levenshtein/")
then opened the ~/lisp/levenshtein/levenshtein.lisp file and started hacking. When I got finished I was able to load it with Quicklisp even though I had not configured ASDF to search ~/lisp/ for projects. I’m really impressed with how easy and useful it is. If you regularly write in Common Lisp you really need to get Quicklisp and Quickproject. They’ll make your life a whole lot more pleasant.