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My Emacs Lisp book is finished

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Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#61

Post by guessbest »

klibertp wrote: post #31
rvdginste wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since that book is over 20 years old, is it still relevant and useful?

Yes. Emacs takes backwards compatibility seriously. Not kernel-level seriously, but seriously. Moreover, a book written 20 years ago was still written more than 20 years after initial Emacs release. By then, a lot of best practices were already discovered and they remain common in Elisp code to this day. There was a lot of development in that time and many things became easier to do, but the basics of writing Elisp p…

Are there any good guides or examples on using elisp to build an environment like ncurses?

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#62

Post by klibertp »

guessbest wrote: post #61
klibertp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Emacs takes backwards compatibility seriously. Not kernel-level seriously, but seriously. Moreover, a book written 20 years ago was still written more than 20 years after initial Emacs release. By then, a lot of best practices were already discovered and they remain common in Elisp code to this day. There was a lot of development in that time and many things became easier to do, but the basics of writing Elisp p…

Are there any good guides or examples on using elisp to build an environment like ncurses?

You can take a look at basically any of the larger apps, like M-x magit, speedbar, neotree, treemacs, calc, undo-tree, proced, tetris, gnus, epa, dired... (some built-in, some 3rd party). By default, when you start Emacs, you are in the lisp-interaction-mode app, which allows you to write (and execute) Elisp code. But, if you start any of the apps above, you'll get window(s) with semantics having nothing in common with editing text. They still display with text (or emoji under GUI), but they treat the buffer contents as something else than just text, and you can create panes with such content anywhere on the screen. I think this is more or less what you get with ncurses.

Here's an example of Emacs running in the terminal with a few apps open: https://klibert.pl/statics/images/emacs_terminal.png You can see treemacs, helm, dired and magit in action.

I could probably give a better example if you said what exactly you'd like to build. There's a lot of apps written for Emacs, not many of them are truly standalone (meaning they tend to integrate into Emacs instead of integrating Emacs into the app), but there are a few like that, too (ie. music players or games).

Re: My Emacs Lisp book is finished

#63

Post by guessbest »

klibertp wrote: post #62
guessbest wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good guides or examples on using elisp to build an environment like ncurses?

You can take a look at basically any of the larger apps, like M-x magit, speedbar, neotree, treemacs, calc, undo-tree, proced, tetris, gnus, epa, dired... (some built-in, some 3rd party). By default, when you start Emacs, you are in the lisp-interaction-mode app, which allows you to write (and execute) Elisp code. But, if you start any of the apps above, you'll get window(s) with semantics having nothing in common wi…

Thanks, this is a good starting point for me.
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