this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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How rewarding learning Elisp can be? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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-package like 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have a good resource for learning this?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm making what I believe to be a better one.

The elisp manual is not bad. Between shortdocs and that, using the scratch buffer or ielm, it's pretty fast to get going. I would save an elisp buffer to a file at first. Scratch is ephemeral by default. Like anything, reinforcement and consistent effort go farther than having the perfect approach.

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