Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjarneh | Hacker News Reader

> I have been using Emacs for quite a while, but never mastered elisp

You are not alone in that boat :-)

As a developer, I find it a bit embarassing that I started using Emacs in 2000, that at some point I even read my email with it, and that I never took the time to really learn emacs-lisp. Still, some day I will. This book might help me. :)

> Still, some day I will

I said I'd lean Spanish some_day® as well, according to duolingo that was 9 years ago :-)

Uh... well, it would be even more embarassing to admit how long I've been telling myself that I'd start learning emacs-lisp in earnest... so I won't. :)

I'm just a devops person, not a coder by any stretch of the imagination, but I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous.

I really dig that it's a full on language used for the configuration files. It just makes so much sense to do it that way. (I also like VSCode's json prefs)

Also I love sharing snippets of my .init.el:

  40   │ ;; Taken from https://karl-voit.at/2017/02/11/my-system-is-foobar/
  41   │ ;; Check if system is Darwin/macOS
  42   │ (defun my-system-type-is-darwin ()
  43   │   "Return non-nil if system is darwin-based (Mac OS X)."
  44   │   (string-equal system-type "darwin")
  45   │   )
  ...
  65   │ 
  66   │ (when (my-system-type-is-darwin)
  67   │   ;; EXAMPLE: (global-set-key (kbd "C-z") 'shell)
  68   │   ;; https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Init-Rebinding.html#Init-Rebinding
  69   │   (global-set-key (kbd "s-/") 'comment-or-uncomment-region-or-line)
  70   │   (global-set-key (kbd "s-<backspace>") '(lambda () (interactive) (kill-line 0)))
  71   │   )

system-type is actually a symbol, so you can do (eq system-type 'darwin) for the same effect. here's my macOS section: https://github.com/bklebe/.emacs.d/blob/b0ca255032d1240942ff...

Nice! I'll definitely take a close look at that.

> I found that maintaining my .init.el in git helped me to learn enough elisp to be useful/dangerous.

The snippets you gave of your init.el are really basic but I do agree with you: working on init.el (and using Git to revert SNAFUs) helped me learn enough elisp to be dangerous too.

The elisp I write is certainly not idiomatic but it gets the job done. I have some functions I wrote more than a decade ago and they still "Just Work [TM]"!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com