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Emacs lisp is something you can figure out a bit at a time: mostly you're writing 'snippets', rather than organizing some huge codebase where you have to know a
by davidw 5y ago
Emacs lisp is something you can figure out a bit at a time: mostly you're writing 'snippets', rather than organizing some huge codebase where you have to know all the ins and outs.
- throwaway2037 5y agoI second this. At my first Real Job after university, I was challenged by a teammate to learn to use Emacs. He laughed at how primitive my (non-Vim!) vi editor was. In hindsight, it was absolutely true. I bought the O'Reilly book for Emacs and spent many weekends teaching myself the basics. You are right: Bit by bit you write tiny macros that do things you need or want. After 1/2/5/10/30 years, your personal macros compound to create real efficiency. I don't use Emacs today, but I do appreciate that the ecosystem is enormous and well-developed.
- quanticle 5y agoI agree that elisp, itself, is quite easy to learn. I wish I could say the same about the emacs API. M-x apropos is somewhat useful, but quite a lot of my editor customizations come down to either 1) reading the source of the functionality that I'm trying to customize and reading what variables it accesses or 2) random Googling to see what others have customized. That said, to emacs' credit, it makes (1) extraordinarily easy. C-h k to see which function is being called by a given key-combination and C-h f to get to the source of that function makes it very easy to look at the internals of the editor and figure what I should setq in order to make the editor behave in the way I want.