### 7.1 Connecting to a remote lisp ¶

One of the advantages of the way SLIME is implemented is that we can easily run the Emacs side (slime.el) on one machine and the lisp backend (swank) on another. The basic idea is to start up lisp on the remote machine, load swank and wait for incoming SLIME connections. On the local machine we start up emacs and tell SLIME to connect to the remote machine. The details are a bit messier but the underlying idea is that simple.