Writing GNU Emacs extensions
by Bob Glickstein · first published 1997
9mentions
8recommended by
8HN commenters
2010–2023first – last mentioned
100% recommend
Why HN recommends it
A practical, example-driven introduction to writing Emacs Lisp extensions and customizations. It is a solid starting point for learning Elisp, with a clear tutorial approach that builds up to a working mode.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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An older but still interesting book, just in case: http://www.amazon.com/Writing-GNU-Emacs-Extensions-Glickstei...
on “Mastering Emacs” ↗…potential issue is googling by default rather than a last resort: increasingly, it is looking like a short term expedient and long term dependency for me, personally. Yesterday as I was fooling around with Writing GNU Emacs Extensions. One of the great things about that book is that Glickstein figures [correctly in my case] that someone learning to write extensions might not have a good handle on other aspects of Emacs...such as help.…
on “Why I Skip Stack Overflow” ↗"Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" by Bob Glickstein is a solid introduction. After that, the Emacs Lisp reference manual (available as "info elisp" in the shell) gives much more detail. Inside Emacs, you can: - "M-x apropos" to search…
on “Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface” ↗There's also Bob Glickstein's Writing GNU Emacs Extensions: Editor Customizations and Creations with Lisp (https://www.amazon.com/Writing-GNU-Emacs-Extensions-Customiz...), which I found quite good at the time. But it's really old. On the other hand, I don't…
on “Emacs Lisp book revived: Marcin Borkowski” ↗An excellent tutorial that takes exactly this approach (building up to a novel Emacs mode for NYT Crosswords, of all things) is the O'Reilly book "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions, by Bob Glickstein.
on “Emacs Is Not Just an Editor” ↗i have used "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" available here: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/writing-gnu-emacs/97814... from a long time past for elisp programming. mentioning it here in the hope that it is is useful to others as well...
on “My Emacs Lisp book is finished” ↗…any elisp code and see the effects immediately in the same instance of the editor. It's obvious in hindsight, but I believe I'd get into Emacs much faster if I started with Emacs Lisp manual or maybe "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" book instead of going through the Emacs manual (huuuuuge!) first and trying to bend my habits to fit the vanilla Emacs. I think most programmers who wish to switch to Emacs should try to do it the other…
on “Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)” ↗I have and like “Mac OS X for Unix Geeks” 4th/Leopard ed. and “Writing GNU Emacs Extensions”.
on “Ask HN: Which O'Reilly books do you like and own?” ↗…/usr/local/share/emacs/25.0.50/lisp/frame.el.gz on my system on line 1223. You can get there with M-x find-function. > Or find some best Emacs lisp practices online. Does it really have to be online? There is a full book for this: "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions". It's old, but solid. [EDIT: and also https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/pdf/eintr.pdf] > Or figure out why I could never get working my one attempt to write a custom function to scratch my own…
on “Atom 1.0” ↗