Read Lisp, Tweak Emacs: How to read Emacs Lisp so that you can customize Emacs by Sacha Chua
From the introduction:
Hi! This is a guide to help you pick up the basics of reading customization code for Emacs – little snippets of Emacs Lisp that you can add to your
~/.emacs.d/init.elto change how Emacs works. I hope this will help you learn how to borrow interesting snippets from README files and other people’s configs so that you can tweak Emacs to fit the way you work. This is not a detailed guide on how to understand Emacs internals, but by the time you find yourself digging through comint.el to figure out what’s going on with command interpretation, you probably already know your way around.We’ll assume that you already have Emacs installed and that you’ve gone through the built-in tutorial (Help – Emacs Tutorial,
<f1> t,C-h t, orM-x help-with-tutorial). I’ll also assume you have a little programming background or can deal with the concepts of variables and functions. Feel free to ask questions if you get stuck on something or if you want to clarify your understanding.Please e-mail questions, comments, and suggestions to sacha@sachachua.com. I want to make this guide better, and I’d love to hear from you. If you would like to help improve this guide, you can find it on Github – pull requests welcome. This guide is dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License and the GNU Free Documentation License, so feel free to read, share, and build on it.
You can find this guide on the Web athttp://emacslife.com/how-to-read-emacs-lisp.html . If you want an EPUB version or a downloadable HTML version, you can get it from Gumroad (free/pay-what-you-want).
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Documentation on Emacs can best be described as “varied.” Both in terms of ease of reading and usefulness.
Sacha’s guide to tweaking Emacs ranks high on both counts.
Do you want an editor:
- brimming with features you don’t want, or
- brimming with features you do want?
Even if you are a user community of one (1), tweaked Emacs can delivery that type of editing experience.
Start the year off right! Learn/tweak Emacs today!