Elisp programming - what's the best setup?

Question

There are all kind of cool programming language modes in Emacs, written in elisp, but apparently no special support for elisp itself.

Since slime is not working for elisp, I ask myself if all that elisp code is just hacked in the scratch buffer? Is there no need for something like slime when writing elisp, or is it simply not there? Is anybody using ECB and semantic for bigger elisp projects?

Answer 1

ielm is the Emacs Lisp REPL: Interactive Emacs Lisp Mode.

M-x ielm gets you there.

Answer 2

Emacs itself comes with Emacs Lisp support. Basic-to-intermediate things like completion (M-TAB), library search (M-x apropos), documentation (C-h f, C-h v, C-h S), running code on-the-fly (C-M-x, M-:) operate directly in the running Emacs.

Slime's primary purpose is interaction with an external process. You don't need that for Emacs Lisp (unless you're developing for a different version of Emacs, but that's a rare concern).

The features of ECB and semantic are mostly useful for large projects (consisting of more than a handful of source files). People don't tend to write large projects in Emacs Lisp.