Hacker News Reader

I think the distinction for me is getting from the mindset of "I'll look for a package for this" as opposed to "let me write some elisp for this."

View on HN

My advice is to use a LLM for that - they are often surprisingly good at producing decent elisp. Maybe not in "publish on ELPA/MELPA" quality, but it can absolutely cover user needs. I know the ecosystem and can read elisp as a coincidence of playing with common lisp - it is enough for glueing things together. The most complicated code I have is around org agenda and export of org tasks - there I needed some LLM help, but I was able to identify and fix performance bottlenecks in some packages and write a config from scratch on my own.

Prot has an intro book on elisp[1] which I want to go through, because some specifics of text processing and buffer usage are a bit unique - it is a lisp for a text editor, after all! But it is still just a lisp, and it even has a lot of common lisp functions in cl-* namespace!

[1] https://protesilaos.com/emacs/emacs-lisp-elements

I've seen worse code published on Melpa.

if you test it and it works, you should publish it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com