You can run Medley either online or locally. Both are fully capable environments so rest assured you don't have to compromise on the featuers available to you. Choose the online version if you want quick and easy access to Medley. You can login as a guest and start poking around right away. When you're ready to dive deeper and want to keep track of files and the state of your environment across sessions, you can create a free account. Use that to log in for your next sessions. Check out Access Medley Online if you have more questions.
If you prefer a more hands-on, web-independent approach, you can build Medley on your computer. Refer to the documentation here: Install and Run, to learn more about how to get Medley installed in your specific operating system.
Both the online and local versions of Medley, lets you create, save and edit files and save the current state of your Medley environment. But the process of doing so differs slightly. Medey's SYSOUT
function saves the current state of Medley's virtual memory in a "sysout file". The section titled Saving Virtual Memory State in the Interlisp Reference Manual can tell you more about SYSOUT's possibilities.
Accessing Files
Once inside Medley Online, to your very left, you'll find a side bar expandable with a left-arrow icon.
We'll talk about the other useful options this sidebar provides. For now, lets focus on the first one, a useful virtual file manager. Click and you should see a warning that the file manager will open in a new window. Go ahead and press Ok. A new tab should appear in your browser with the following window:
Right above, the text "Name", you'll notice that all our important files are stored inside a folder titled "il".
If you're running Medley locally, your system files are also inside a folder titled "il" but your saved files will be in a nested subfolder titled "home". So, when you save files in Medley Online, it's saved to the path il/
When you save files in Medley Local, your files are saved to the path: il/home/username/
{% hint style="info" %} "username" will of course be replaced by your username. {% endhint %}
As we learn to use LOAD , MAKEFILES and other helpful functions related to handling files in Medley Interlisp, we don't need to change our file paths while using either versions of Medley but it's good to be aware where they are located so we can use that information later to organize our files better.