I’m a new emacs user and I’ve been using doom emacs for a while now and i’m willing to learn Elisp, but found out that it might not be as easy as it might seem at first, because as i found out, lisp is quite different from other programming languages that i’m used to, especially knowing that i’m not a programmer by any means and my programming knowledge is very little, not mentioning that elisp is pretty old so the learning resources might not be as much as other more popular programming languages
so my question is, Is it worth it?
like what is the level of mastery do i need to achieve to start implementing custom elisp in my configs to enhance my emacs experience?
and how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?
in other words, how rewarding it would be
Yes. It’s worth it.
If you’ve ever tweaked your Doom config, you’re already writing elisp. Going from setting options to writing new modes will certainly take time, but lisp is a language that builds on itself.
In fact, Emacs+elisp is one of the best systems for learning by doing. C-h f, C-h v, C-x C-e, etc will get you far. The built in tutorial is absolutely worth going thru, and understanding lisp will improve your understanding of other languages as well.
Let me cite RMS to answer that:
The editor itself was written entirely in Lisp. Multics Emacs proved to be a great success—programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn’t say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn’t do programming, weren’t scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.
source: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
Programming in elisp is fun, too. Since it’s (typical for Lisp!) interactive programming features.
Well, if you want to customise Emacs - obviously it’s worth learning. Im not quite sure where you get that idea that because its “old” then its support is somehow worse than “more popular” languages. It has great documentation - in editor too.
Is it just me or have there been a lot of posts lately from accounts with overall negative comment karma.
Not just you and it’s not just /r/emacs or /r/org-mode, I’ve seen them in other places as well. While the guy in /r/org-mode wasn’t one, most of them write so poorly that they must be ESL people and argue about minute things that well-adjusted (genuine?) people wouldn’t argue about.
The other thing I’m seeing is an increase in duplicated posts to multiple forums asking fragmentary, barely coherent questions. Writing this, I just had the obvious epiphany that my assumption–there’s a person at the other end–might be wrong.
Hm, yeah, imagine some kind of service that takes a question from a user and posts it on Reddit, then feeds the answers into its own ML model and gives something back to the user (with a significant delay, obviously, so maybe more for training purposes).
There was a post here within the past couple of months that, when I looked at its account history, seemed to be obviously some kind of bot, but its writing was coherent enough to seem authentic in isolation.
Seems like a dark time for the Web is coming. :/
I’m not in love with elisp but I learned enough of it to make emacs do what I want.
I’ll admit without shame that the for complicated stuff, I do it all in python helpers, and I just use elisp to marshall data to and from python.
A better elisp developer than me would do everything in elisp… but I need to get things done quickly and dirty.
How rewarding learning Elisp can be?
How rewarding learning anything is?
how exactly can i improve my emacs experience if i learned elisp?
You can program Emacs to do stuff you want it to do, the way you want it to do. It is like asking how can I improve my computer usage if I learn a programming language.