I’m a new emacs user and I’ve been using doom emacs for a while now and i’m willing to learn Elisp, but found out that it might not be as easy as it might seem at first, because as i found out, lisp is quite different from other programming languages that i’m used to, especially knowing that i’m not a programmer by any means and my programming knowledge is very little, not mentioning that elisp is pretty old so the learning resources might not be as much as other more popular programming languages
so my question is, Is it worth it?
like what is the level of mastery do i need to achieve to start implementing custom elisp in my configs to enhance my emacs experience?
and how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?
in other words, how rewarding it would be
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Lisp and Scheme are marvelous 60s-70s hippie acid-head languages. “Hey, let’s use a small set of primitives and treat code and data the same and we can run huge worlds with a tiny, recursive interpreter!”
By the time you get to Emacs though, many huge worlds have been built, and navigating the huge world(s) that small set of primitives has created can be…uh…daunting – both because of 1000s of people’s contributions and because of the weight of history (e.g. booleans are “predicates” – from calculus – thus all the “_p” names).
That said, at it’s core, it’s elegant and lovely.
so my question is, Is it worth it?
It’s worth more than a bunch of other people’s opinions.
Is it just me or have there been a lot of posts lately from accounts with overall negative comment karma.
Not just you and it’s not just /r/emacs or /r/org-mode, I’ve seen them in other places as well. While the guy in /r/org-mode wasn’t one, most of them write so poorly that they must be ESL people and argue about minute things that well-adjusted (genuine?) people wouldn’t argue about.
The other thing I’m seeing is an increase in duplicated posts to multiple forums asking fragmentary, barely coherent questions. Writing this, I just had the obvious epiphany that my assumption–there’s a person at the other end–might be wrong.
It’s pretty tiny compared to a lot of languages considering that most of what you use it for is working with Emacs, which has a small number of intrinsic types like buffers, windows, frames, text properties etc.
Compared to being the kind of person who reads
use-packagelike JSON and treats it like a declaration language, you will be light years ahead at configuration if you just know lists, quoting, alists, plists, and writing functions. Users who don’t go at least that far will be constantly shooting themselves in the foot and spending much more time with minor, novice level bugs that are completely obvious.Do you have a good resource for learning this?
I’m not in love with elisp but I learned enough of it to make emacs do what I want.
I’ll admit without shame that the for complicated stuff, I do it all in python helpers, and I just use elisp to marshall data to and from python.
A better elisp developer than me would do everything in elisp… but I need to get things done quickly and dirty.
Yes. It’s worth it.
If you’ve ever tweaked your Doom config, you’re already writing elisp. Going from setting options to writing new modes will certainly take time, but lisp is a language that builds on itself.
In fact, Emacs+elisp is one of the best systems for learning by doing. C-h f, C-h v, C-x C-e, etc will get you far. The built in tutorial is absolutely worth going thru, and understanding lisp will improve your understanding of other languages as well.
There is a buildin tutorial ? where can I find it , since I also would love to get started learning more elisp!
When I want to add an automatic garage door, I don’t go on r/ElectricalEngineering and ask how rewarding learning EE can be. I decide wtf I want to have happen, then google accordingly.
