Writing GNU Emacs Extensions: Editor Customizations and Creations with Lisp

This is the best book for readers who wants to learn to write code for Emacs. Unfortunately, it's the only one, I haven't found another book like it, and it is a bit old, some things have already changed in Emacs, a new edition would be welcome.This book is not for beginners, it asks same Emacs and Lisp experience.

Showed up rather quickly, by that night I was coding extensions in Lisp, just like the big boys! The only problem was that the book had been used by a student, as all the good stuff was underlined, bad, maybe not.

Awesome book. Loved all the cool examples, they are actually useful!

OK !

I found this book quite useful to get me started on writing Gnu emacs Lisp. It is clear and fairly well organized, and far easier to deal with than the standard documentation, which I find lacks the level of organization needed for so large a language.By "large" I mean mainly the number of functions available. Lisp as a language is not really hard to learn; it is just so different from many programming languages that it requires a few days of effort to get to "aha!". After that it becomes easy.The drawback to this book is that it doesn't take you far enough. It is an excellent start, and having worked through it you should be able to find your way around in the online or other emacs Lisp documentation. However, it lacks an index of emacs Lisp functions, or other similar reference material. I find this unfortunate, but it's not a show-stopper because once you get through this book you will know enough to use other reference material.

...is reading this book. Step 1 would be to read O'Reilly's "Learning Gnu Emacs" from cover to cover. Step 2 would be to start bookmarking "Info" pages in the Emacs and Elisp manuals (inside Emacs; Emacs can bookmark places in files you've edited, bookmark directories, bookmark Info pages, etc.); and then you are ready to read this book.While you can become proficient in Emacs just by learning a handful of commands, to be truly productive and happy you must learn most of the features and use them. This is a very long process (over a year for me, learning a little bit more each day). But what I've gained from the journey is invaluable. For example, one insight I've gotten is that Emacs can work very well for the novice (open/type/save/close) and the expert (write major mode to handle new language) equally well, and this idea can apply to any software project. (Sure, it sounds simplistic but the moment of "Aha!" is more profound than that.)This book is fairly small and progressively introduces new ideas in writing Lisp code to add functionality to Emacs. I think in retrospect the topics covered were well chosen because I have looked up the examples time and again to use code snippets.Step 4 in mastering Emacs is to read the newsgroup gnu.emacs.help every day for a few months, which will teach you about a great many features Emacs has that are not covered in any book (or covered very well, like term mode, font-lock and many more).

love it

This book is a collection of tutorials, it will help you start using and understanding Emacs. If you are a newbie, then it's a good starting point to use and customize Emacs. However, as a software engineer, I don't see the "big picture", meaning what really happens when Emacs starts, what are the main components of Emacs and how these components communicate with each other, which I think should be the first step needed to customize a software.So, this book has a gentle introduction to Emacs which is good if you just started using Emacs, but don't expect to be an expert in Emacs customization or have low level details of Emacs internals.

In my opinion this is exactly the missing link between introductory material on Emacs and the reference manual.A reasoned guide written by a developer that will take you from a casual knowledge of the editor to being able to write minor and major modes.The book has a manageable size, to be read in a weekend. It's very well written, well reviewed and fun to read.I cannot recommend this book enough to anyone interested in Emacs beyond basic editor usage.

Looks useful, but I have not had time to get to the really hairy bits.