by graham marlow

Quick Emacs Lisp

Learn the programming language behind the world's most extensible text editor.

Quick Emacs Lisp bridges the gap between beginner introduction and reference manual. It's written for existing programmers who need help demystifying Lisp esoterica but are eager to start hacking.

This book teaches you everything you need to build and publish your own Emacs packages.

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    The book will support three different formats:

    • A free (forever!) web version
    • PDF
    • Ebook (epub)

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    Why learn Emacs Lisp?

    • Experience the productivity that comes with mastery of a fully-extensible text editor.
    • Understand the magic behind Lisp macros that make them so much more powerful than macros in other languages.
    • Knowledge of Emacs Lisp translates naturally to other Lisp dialects, like Common Lisp, Scheme, or Clojure.
    • Coding in Emacs Lisp is uniquely delightful because the text editor doubles as a language interpreter.

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    About the author

    Hi, I'm Graham Marlow.

    Three years ago I discovered Emacs and experienced a loss of self-control that left me endlessly hacking my configuration. Emacs became a frequent topic on my blog as I started maintaining a handful of packages on MELPA, including deno-ts-mode and flymake-clippy.

    I learned a ton about the language while creating Emacs packages, both from the insightful (yet overwhelming) content of the Emacs Manual and the accumulated knowledge of Emacs greybeards across the internet. I found that while the sheer amount of content on the Emacs Lisp programming language is vast, it's not very approachable. This book is an attempt to fix that.

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    Can't wait to start hacking? Check out Start Emacs.