Carriage return in SLIME output
Here is a small Emacs/SLIME tip, since I couldn't find it on Google and I had to come up with the solution myself. I'm
working on a long running Common Lisp program and I print a dot every few thousand iterations, so that I know that
something is happening; then every few hundred of thousands I want to replace those dots with some stats about the
computation, so I'm writing a carriage return (char code 13) and the stats. On a normal terminal, the whole line of
dots will be replaced by the new output, but Emacs just prints ^M and adds the stats on the same line.
Although SLIME seems to be derived from Comint mode, it doesn't use the same code for output (Comint already handles a bunch of caret movement codes, including CR). To make it work in SLIME, paste the following somewhere in your Emacs config (it probably needs SLIME to be already loaded for the advice to work; it is loaded in my case):
;; Interpret #\Return in SLIME output (carriage-return)
(defun my-slime-fix-output (orig-fun &rest args)
(with-current-buffer (slime-output-buffer)
(ignore-errors
(let ((pos (marker-position slime-output-end)))
(apply orig-fun args)
(comint-carriage-motion pos (marker-position slime-output-end))))))
(advice-add 'slime-repl-emit :around 'my-slime-fix-output)