Xah's Emacs Lisp Tutorial

Xah Lee, 2005, ..., 2008.

This is a emacs lisp tutorial. The tutorial is focused on practical needs, and gives many examples.

This tutorial is designed so that each lesson is self-contained. However, it is recommened you read all items in the Elisp Basics section, and in order.

Elisp Basics

• Emacs Lisp Basics
• Overview to Text-Edit Programing In Emacs
• Simple Elisp Examples!
• Tips For Editing Lisp Code With Emacs

References

• Elisp Common Functions Reference
• Introduction to Elisp References

Real-World Case-Example Lessons

Generic Tasks

• Regex Replace with a Function. Writing a function for the replacement string.
• Creating Next/Previous Navigation Bars. Use a custom function for replacement string, to create navigation bars for pages of a htmlized book.
• Repeated Find Replace. A command that cleans the current file by a set of Find-Replace operations.
• Execute/Compile Current File. A command that executes the current file.

Writing A Command That Changes Text At Cursor Point

Simple cases.

• Writing a wrap-url Function. Turn a url into a html link
• Writing image-linkify Function. Turn a file path into a HTML inline image.
• Writing make-html-table. Turn a text block into a HTML table.
• Writing a Custom HTML Link Function. Turn a word into a html link to local file, by a personalized heuristics.

More complex cases.

• Writing a google-earth Function. Create a google-earth link, and KML file, according to parameters under cursor.
• Writing htmlize-block Function for Syntax Coloring Code In HTML. Turn the current block of text of language code into syntax-colored html marked-up text.

Batch-style or Complex Text Processing

• Text Processing with Elisp
• Text Processing HTML
• Process A Thousand Files

Emacs Lisp Language Detail

• Elisp Lesson: Hash-table

Misc

• Emacs Command Frequency
• Emacs Lisp Function Frequency
• How Purely Nested Notation Limits The Language's Utility

Page created: 2007-10.
© 2007 by Xah Lee.