Tag Archives: Elisp

A few weeks ago, Bozhidar Batsov had a splendid post on cl-flet, cl-letf, and cl-labels. I didn’t get a chance to write about it then but his post is very useful for understanding these macros and how they differ. The … Continue reading →

Another short post today but one that some of you may find useful. Over at the Emacs subreddit, James Cherti offers a set of commit hooks for Elisp programmers. There are hooks that check for parenthesis consistency, byte compile to … Continue reading →

If you aren’t an Elisp programmer—or at least some sort of Lisp programmer—this post won’t make much sense to you. If you do write in Elisp/Lisp, it tells you how to sand down a tiny bump in your workflow. It … Continue reading →

Some time ago, Protesilaos Stavrou published a nice book on Emacs Lisp. The idea is to bring a “big picture approach” to Elisp so that every Emacs user can experience the joy of fine tuning Emacs to meet their exact … Continue reading →

Over at the Lisp subreddit, Combinatorilliance asks if there are any studies addressing the question of whether infix or prefix notation is easier to read and understand. There are, of course, fierce partisans on both sides of the question. We … Continue reading →

If you write in Elisp, Edebug, a source level debugger for Elisp, can be a real help in debugging your code. The problem is that it’s fairly hard to use and has no UI to speak of other than opaque … Continue reading →

All the cool kids use debuggers for debugging their code. In most situations that’s the right answer. After all, you can set breakpoints, step through your code, and examine values at each step. If you want a detailed view into … Continue reading →

James Cherti has a quick tip on configuring Git to provide more meaningful diffs for Elisp files. The problem, he says, is that by default Git diffs simply provide a line-by-line difference with no added context such as what functions … Continue reading →

If you follow the various Emacs forums, you’ll see a lot a whining about how hard Elisp is to learn and how things would be so much better if only the extension language were something rational like Python, Ruby, or … Continue reading →

Over at the Emacs subreddit, AbstProcDo proposes an interesting idea: some Elisp constructs are very intuitive and natural compared to other languages. He uses the example of dolist to process a list versus the Python way. (dolist (item ‘(1 2 … Continue reading →