The ACL2 Sidekick is a graphical add-on for ACL2. It extends your ACL2 session with a web server so that you can interact with ACL2 through your browser. You use the Sidekick along with—not instead of—Emacs or your favorite ACL2 development environment.
Note: the Sidekick is highly experimental software and at this point is mostly a proof of concept.
Screenshots:
The Sidekick has been tested on CCL on Linux with Firefox or Chromium as the browser. It might possibly work on other Lisps, most likely SBCL and LispWorks.
To build the Sidekick, build ACL2 as usual and then certify at least the
$ cd acl2 $ make LISP=ccl $ cd acl2/books $ make USE_QUICKLISP=1 basic quicklisp
Then certify the sidekick books:
$ cd acl2/books/projects/sidekick $ cert.pl top # should produce top.cert
The Sidekick should now be ready. To try it out, go to the
For instant startup times, you can build an ACL2 image with the Sidekick built in.
$ cd acl2/books/projects/sidekick $ make # should produce a 'sidekick' executable $ ./sidekick
You can then use this
You can tell the Sidekick to automatically launch a web browser when it
boots up by setting the
$ export SIDEKICK_BROWSER="firefox"
Whatever command you supply will simply be invoked, in the background, with
the argument
The Sidekick will try to listen on port 9000 by default, but this can be adjusted using SIDEKICK_PORT. For instance:
$ export SIDEKICK_PORT=9001
You can also explicitly start the sidekick on a different port by using,
e.g.,