A guided tour of the Common Lisp interface manager

Abstract

The Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) is a powerful Lisp-based system that provides a layered set of facilities for building user interfaces. These facilities include a portable layer called Silica that includes 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 similar to the work pioneered in the Genera UI system; 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.