Álvaro Ramírez has a very revealing post about the compounding benefits of learning a bit of Elisp. Studying how Emacs works and learning its various features pays huge dividends but, says Ramírez, learning some Elisp can compound those dividends and enable you to mold Emacs to a tool hyperspecialized to your needs.
He starts by postulating two features that you realize would be even more useful if you could somehow combine them. Then he gives a specific example. He considers the two packages symbol-overlay and multiple-cursors. The symbol-overlay package highlights all occurrences of the symbol under point in the current buffer and, of course, multiple-cursors lets you perform the same operation in multiple places at the same time.
He uses them both all the time but realized that it would be very handy if he could invoke multiple-cursors with a cursor on each occurrence of the symbol under point. He needed, in short, to combine the action of symbol-overlay and multiple-cursors.
That turns out to be fairly easy if you know some Elisp. Ramírez walks us through how he figured out how to do it and shows the Elisp that does it. There’s not a lot of code (about 20 lines), it’s easy to understand, and it serves as a great example of how a bit of Elisp can work magic. Finally, he made an animated GIF that shows it in action.
This is a nice post and it provides some code that you may find useful for your own workflow. Take a few minutes to give it a look.