About the User Guide

The Common Lisp Interface Manager (CLIM) is a powerful Lisp-based toolkit that provides a layered set of portable facilities for constructing user interfaces. The Common Lisp Interface Manager User Guide is intended for CLIM programmers who are looking for material arranged by concept. The Guide, based on the CLIM II Specification, is a complete reference for the LispWorks version of CLIM. Each chapter of the User Guide explains a key aspect of CLIM and includes summaries of conditions, constants, functions, macros, and presentation types that pertain to the particular topic, as well as many code examples. For a detailed syntactic description of a particular CLIM construct, refer to the on-line CLIM manual pages.

Notational Conventions

The User Guide employs the following conventions to distinguish different types of text.

construct Lisp and CLIM constructs, such as functions or classes.

significant term Significant terms introduced for the first time. These terms appear in the glossary.

code examples Computer-generated text, prompts, and messages, as well as code examples and user entries.

KEYSTROKES References to keystrokes, as in META or SHIFT . Logical keystrokes are enclosed in angle brackets. Thus for <ABORT> , you might type CONTROL-z ; for <END> , CONTROL-] ; and for <HELP> , META-? .

function arguments Arguments to functions.

specified arguments Specific values for arguments within code examples.

unspecified arguments Arguments within code examples for which the user must supply a value.

Menu Item Menu items, as in Exit or File>Save or Up .

filename Pathnames, filenames, and parts of filenames.

Please note that <release-directory> refers to the location of CLIM in the LispWorks library. <release-directory>/demo/puzzle.lisp should be interpreted as <lispworks-directory>/lib/<version-number>/clim2/demo/puzzle.lisp .

Mouse pointer gestures are capitalized, as in Left or SHIFT -Middle.