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Emacs Lisp Elements

(protesilaos.com)
339 points robenkleene | 3 comments | 12 Apr 25 15:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.675s | source
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ajross ◴[12 Apr 25 19:39 UTC] No.43667357[source]▶
Seems clear and useful. That said, there's nothing particularly bad or inaccessible about the actual Emacs Lisp manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/elisp.ht...

Or the official tutorial: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eintr.ht... (which to be clear I haven't read, but have heard nice things about).

Of all the things for which emacs can be criticised, documentation rigor is really not one.

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1. db48x ◴[12 Apr 25 20:24 UTC] No.43667664[source]▶
Agreed; Emacs is the gold standard for documentation. It comes with a reference manual (400k words), an Emacs Lisp reference (600k words), _and_ 64 other manuals for individual Emacs modes or features including one just for Calc mode (250k words), a manual just for Org mode (130k words), one for Gnus (180k words) etc. All told it adds up to about 2.6 million words of documentation.

Still, another manual written from a different perspective probably won’t hurt anything.

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2. beepbooptheory ◴[12 Apr 25 22:07 UTC] No.43668275[source]▶
The Gnus manual in particular has certain whimsical Pratchett-esque charm to it that I love so much.
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3. kstrauser ◴[13 Apr 25 04:50 UTC] No.43670177[source]▶
The manual (https://www.gnus.org/manual.html) starts with:

> See what the critics say about the manual:

> “Often when I read the manual, I think that we should take a collection up to have Lars psycho-analysed.”