The author discusses their approach to writing small, stand-alone command line programs in Common Lisp. They prefer to have each program as a single file, with the necessary libraries and user interface properly implemented. The author also explains the directory structure they use for their programs and provides a skeleton structure for the .lisp files, including sections for configuration, errors, functionality, and user interface. They also provide scripts for building the binaries and man pages, as well as a Makefile for easy regeneration of binaries and man pages. The author concludes with a case study of a batch coloring utility they use to highlight regular expression matches in text.
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2021/03/small-common-lisp-cli-programs/