The first video in Mike Zamansky’s promised series on Elisp has dropped. This video serves as an introduction to the series. It mostly positions Emacs as a Lisp interpreter that comes with an editor. Or as Irreal is fond of saying, a recapitulation of the original Lisp Machines. Emacs is not really a Lisp Machine, of course, but I’ve found that it helps my understanding of it to think of it that way.
Zamansky’s central point is that everything you do in Emacs amounts to running one of it’s commands. The obligatory example is what happens when you type a character into a buffer. That results in the command self-insert-command being run. Zamansky shows how you can run any s-expression in a buffer by putting the cursor at the end of it and running eval-last-sexp (bound to Ctrl+x Ctrl+e) and uses that to open a file and to change to another buffer.
Zamansky takes the material slow and easy. Even though he described it as just a short introduction to the series, the video ran 19 minutes, 49 seconds so he’s making sure to cover each point carefully and illustrate it with examples. Obviously, at almost 20 minutes, you’re going to have to schedule some time but as with all of Zamansky’s videos, it’s time well spent.