If Only

Joe Marshall has an X little post on Lisp. I used X because I’m not sure of the correct adjective to use. Maybe “snarky”, maybe “cute”, maybe “enlightening”, maybe “interesting”. The idea of the post is that if you find yourself wanting some missing capability when writing in Lisp you can, in fact, simply add it. In other words, you can make Lisp into whatever language you need it do be.

Everybody knows that, of course, but it got me thinking that the same thing applies to Emacs. If it doesn’t do something you want or it doesn’t do it in the exact way that you want, it’s easy to make it do so.

Sure, you probably have to know Elisp to make a lot of the changes but despite what some folks tell you, it’s not that hard to learn Elisp. It’s mostly a matter of learning the API, not Lisp itself. Once you do learn it, you have an infinitely malleable editor at your disposal. Are there some upfront costs? Sure but they’re worth it and once you get past them you have an editor that can be made to do almost anything you can imagine.

Others have already embraced this possibility and now we can read and send email, listen to music, follow RSS, and a host of other things from within the comfort of Emacs. Just as Lisp is the programmable programming language, Emacs is the programmable editor.

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