emacs
I am writing in emacs org mode again which I quite enjoy doing.
In the last couple of days since CNY, my focus is emacs. I RTFM about it, try to use it and even compile from the git repo.
I recalled my memories about the emacs built-in tutorial to gain basic keyboard nevigation and editing. Then read about the manual. It is a quite an undertaking. I just glanced through it and get most of my basic editing tasks done. I am sure that I will come back to it on and off.
Then An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp. It is very basic introduction to Emacs Lisp and functional programming in a general sense. The reading experience is a small surprise. The author [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Chassell][Robert
- Chassell]] writes the book with a light-hearted humor as he is
treating the reader as a friend and discuss emacs over the coffee table. Unfortunately such a talent is lost in 2017.
After I get started with Lisp, I dig deeper with the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual. It is even a heavier undertaking. It covers essentially each and every aspects about lisp. Again, I have glanced through it. The takeaway is that I have a better understanding about lambda functions and closures. I do not completely understand the concepts in a crystal clear way but the looming picture is clearer.
Learning emacs is a bit complicated for me. I am somehow at a lost at this point. I get started by treating emacs as an editor. Then realised that it is in fact a lisp interpreter wrapped with various editing functions. It can be learnt as using a collection of lisp libraries. If you have used and developed dBase III+, you will see what I mean. Each aspect demands knowledge of the other. The typical example is that, after learning some of the major lisp functions, everything makes sense in the editing keystrokes. But quickly the entire emacs knowledge increases.
Now I tried to take a glimspe of the source code. It is C wrapped with a lots of lisp functions. Things might not progress too much at this front.
While I am foraying into the emacs echo system, I have come aross Ashton Wiersdorf's webpage. He is a PhD student, a FreeBSD user and most importantly, an emacs user. His blog posts have shed some lights on my journey on emacs and it seems that we have similar mindsets.
Last but not least, this is the emacs I am using:
