A curated list of Emacs Lisp development resources
github.com
github.com
That also finally elucidated the staying power of emacs. I don’t know of any other software system that has the same introspective capabilities as emacs. That makes learning and modifying emacs a natural extension of whatever you’re doing.
To be clear, these limitations in reasonable package scope come with positive trade-offs in the broader ecosystem such as promoting stability, inter-operability within emacs, and the insulatory disuse of FFI. I just feel like Emacs promised me I could do anything with elisp, and then denied me the low-level control that a lisp like Guile or Common Lisp is capable of. Helix does this better by not h̶a̶v̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶e̶x̶t̶e̶n̶s̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ making any promises.
Quite annoying, because all I was asking for it was to move the point around or search backward or forward for specific strings. Eventually, I had to reference stackoverflow and rewrite most of what chatgpt produced to get something working. Some of these resources would have been quite useful last month.
The package itself is a markdown-notebook minor mode. If you trying to write a readme for your github python package, the mode allows you to add codeblocks, execute them and put the results just below them in the document. Works well for text right now, but need to figure out how to make it put images.
[1] https://gist.github.com/abdullahkhalids/83055b1abbd2cdf2416a...
But github readmes should ideally be in markdown, and it makes no sense to write in org-mode and export to markdown.
Popularity.
That's it. orgmode format was around long before Markdown, then all of a sudden Markdown got pushed hard for some reason.
That's not really true. org-mode (2003) and markdown (2004) only have a year between them. Markdown was pushed more broadly (versus org-mode) because it was not tied to a specific implementation in a specific editor and was just for marking up text whereas org-mode was meant to tie in with more of emacs' other packages and capabilities.
If you weren't already using emacs, you likely wouldn't have known of org-mode in the late '00s. Markdown had already been incorporated into a lot of static blogging systems and forum comment systems by then with many independent implementations. Additionally, org-mode wasn't made a default element of emacs until 2006, two years after markdown was publicly documented.
All that said, I still prefer org-mode and use it for my own readmes outside of actual work where I stick to markdown.
Give it a shot! What have you got to lose?
Doing the book "Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" at the moment, it's lovely.
So that's all I wanted to say - there's no courage required. Just doing. Emacs is a joy, and there's no rush on these things.
(Common) Lisp is multi paradigm so you can write code that looks very much like "C with the parenthesis in the wrong spot" and it'll work just fine until you evolve a more idiomatic/"lispy" style.
If you're proficient in C, Java, and Python you already have everything you need to be proficient in lisp. It's honestly not that difficult to learn.
But gee whiz, what other editing system allows different colored left-and right-paren pairs as one's lisp nesting level goes up?
Emacs isn't an editor. It's a Way of Life. As the young lady said, "I said, Live it, or Live with it!"