SICP’s availability has allowed for reworking it’s text for contemporary audiences. A notable piece of kit that’s come light years since the 80s is Emacs which today regarded as the best environment for doing SICP and programming Scheme.

Emacs offers an extremely in-depth (if esoteric) help system using the document format Texinfo. Installing texinfo documents is simple but the provided documentation inexplicably leaves out critical steps.

Here’s what I did to get it working 1.

  1. Download an .info copy of SICP
  2. $mv ~/Downloads/sicp.info.gz ~/Downloads/sicp.info
  3. $ mv =(unzip sicp.info) /usr/local/share/info
  4. $ install-info ~/Downloads/sicp.info

Footnotes:

1

Thanks to Adom H. for reaching out with a correction to these instructions.