Three weeks ago, I wrote about Geoffrey Lessel’s video on writing an Emacs package to obtain a list of Pull Requests from a GitHub repository, present a chooser list, and then display the chosen PR in the default browser. That would be an interesting project in any case but it’s especially so in Lessel’s case because he’s an Elisp beginner; a rank beginner, really.
The thing with Lessel is that he’s relentless in leveraging Emacs’ documentation and discoverability to figure out what he needs to do next. He spends a lot of time finding functions with a keyword search and reading through them to find the one he needs next.
At the end of the video I posted about above, Lessel had written code to retrieve the PRs from GitHub and build a list of the results. In his latest video he finishes the package by writing code to select the desired PR and display it in the browser.
As in the first video, those familiar with Elisp may be frustrated with Lessel’s floundering around as he searches for the correct function but it’s worth watching as a wonderful example of how even a beginner can make significant extensions to Emacs in order to make it better fit his workflow.
The first video was quite long but this one is just 26 minutes. Still too long for a coffee break but short enough to find time for it.