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lem-project
lem
Common Lisp2016–2026
lem-project / lem

lem

General-purpose editor/IDE with high expansibility in Common Lisp

33Distinct people
49Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

General-purpose editor/IDE with high expansibility in Common Lisp

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year49 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-12-01 06:19:51 UTC to 2026-07-23 16:22:54 UTC.

0510152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 3 submissions, 6 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 0 submissions, 13 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 0 submissions, 6 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC936
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC725
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13013
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC606
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

49 sources
Thanks for sharing. I've been off editor hopping for quite some time, nowadays I just use some pre-defined configuration like Doom Emacs, occasionally I try to build some environment, with AI help, from "scratch" for fun and curiosity. I really like Emacs' flexibility + evil-mode and reactivity, recently I searched for something similar and found Lem: https://github.com/lem-project/lem, looks promising, I'll try it out and compare with Emacs when I have the chance and time.
In Editing Code in Emacs
Emacs took a wrong fork in its own metaphor. At length, being able to take code and libraries between production and the editor would be a game changer. While Elisp has design features that make sense, in the tradeoffs, I think it lost to every other lisp with a general purpose programming ecosystem. I have a hope for the Common Lisp based Lem. All we need is to coordinate enough signal for potential users to feel it's the right time for their actions. Go star Lem https://github.com/lem-project/lem I feel the same way about org mode. Nice. Can I use it on a team? Get real. I'd like more embedded data functionality in markdown. It's not XML, and that's good. Org is just weird. AFAIK it's still trying to figure out inline data embedding, so the embedding isn't even that strong. Doing something like exporting with a CSS class aro
Read the rest
und a specific word probably uses some awkward literal syntax instead. There are consequences to the monastic culture around Emacs. It's really good at holding itself in place. If you don't buy that tradeoff, you need to keep shopping.
In How I am deeply integrating Emacs
When I get fed up with VSCode, I run Emacs and I feel happy until I start working on something else that can be done a little faster on VSCode because of the available extensions. I feel like we almost need government intervention to keep GitHub an open commons, but I am a Libertarian and I distrust the government perhaps even more than the tech industry - still an open question for me. Lock in and control by huge corporations is almost always uniformly bad. I have accepted the message of great books like Privacy is Power, The Tech Coup, and Surveillance Capitalism, and I feel pretty good about just using Google’s Gemini APIs when I need them, and lean as hard as possible on open models running on Ollama and LM Studio. There are also little things you can do like not installing apps and using web apps. Back to test editors: the Lem Emacs-
Read the rest
like editor written in Common Lisp is an interesting project https://github.com/lem-project/lem
In GitHub is no longer independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation
Wondering if the Lem project is “accepted” (or worth a test drive) by the Emacs community. I’m a long time Emacs user, occasionally leaving but always returning. Lately, Lem has my attention. https://github.com/lem-project/lem For those not familiar, Lem is very approximately an Emacs, natively written and extendable in Common Lisp, multiplatform, NCurses & SDL2, etc. LSP. And fast.
In EmacsConf 2024 Notes
While I'm not an Emacs user I like the philosophy of it. And I like text editors. That said, I use orgmode on android (orgzly) and used it on sublime text (orgextended), that's a nice feature. I know one guy who uses emacs and when I heard of lem (https://github.com/lem-project/lem) I told him. (Lem is also in CL) He was quite enthusiastic of it, but 2 or 3 things were missing at the time, the first of all you guessed it, it's org-mode, second was magit but he could use lem without it and finally it was a plugin manager (but we agreed it is a lot of work). I don't know what are your plans but I hope I could give you some ideas.
In Neomacs: Structural Lisp IDE/browser/computing environment

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