This directory contains a simple elisp tutorial, presented in several lessons. After going through the lessons, you should be familiar enough with Emacs Lisp to read and write elisp programs of moderate complexity, and to continue your studies independently.
Before you get into this particular tutorial, check out the most excellent Emacs-Lisp Intro by Robert J. Chassell. Recommended.
See the author's free software page for other (potentially :-) educational works.
To follow along properly, you will need an Emacs running under a sane operating system, such as GNU/Linux. If you are stuck under anything by Microsoft, the tutorial is still workable, but will probably be less fun. You must start Emacs by typing at a command prompt: "emacs -q" and pressing Return (or Enter as you may see on your keyboard). This is recommended over starting Emacs from a pull-down menu because the "-q" option means "quick start"; the normal initializations that take a long time are bypassed. This also helps us stay on the same page, for some of these initializations may not be compatible with this tutorial.
Although the page you are reading is html, the body of the tutorial is
presented as heavily commented elisp code. It is extremely
important that you save each lesson as a writeable file that is opened
from within Emacs by `M-x find-file'. Simply reading the file may offer
you some insight, but the whole point of the tutorial is to interact
with the elisp programming environment (that is, Emacs). Thus, the
only way to proceed is to grab the gzipped
tarball
(version "2002-10-29 09:20:50 +0000")
and unpack it locally.
This also gives you a chance to modify the files
for maximal empirical benefit.
Start with lesson01.el. There will be times when you are asked to do
certain things in Emacs; these are identifiable by a prompt consisting
of two greater-than signs. The instructions follow. Try to follow the
instructions in the order given; the tutorial usually depends on this.
Lessons
The following people have provided valuable comments and ideas. The tutorial is richer through their participation.
Please feel free to join these folks by sending feedback on tutorial content or style, or anything else related to learning elisp.